Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it's cracked up to be. That's why people are so cynical about it.… It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more.

About Erica Jong

Erica Jong (née Mann; born March 26, 1942) is an American novelist, satirist, and poet known particularly for her 1973 novel Fear of Flying. The book became famously controversial for its attitudes towards female sexuality and figured prominently in the development of second-wave feminism, selling over 37 million copies worldwide.

More quotations from Erica Jong

Take your life in your own hands and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame.

—Erica Jong

The trick is not how much pain you feel—but how much joy you feel. Any idiot can feel pain. Life is full of excuses to feel pain, excuses not to live, excuses, excuses, excuses.

—Erica Jong

A book burrows into your life in a very profound way because the experience of reading is not passive.

—Erica Jong

I am not sure at all / if love is salve / or just / a deeper kind of wound.

—Erica Jong

Growing up female in America. What a liability! You grew up with your ears full of cosmetic ads, love songs, advice columns, whoreoscopes, Hollywood gossip, and moral dilemmas on the level of tv soap operas. What litanies the advertisers of the good life chanted at you! What curious catechisms!

—Erica Jong

More quotations tagged with “fighting”

Adversity has the same effect on a man that severe training has on the pugilist: it reduces him to his fighting weight.

—Josh Billings

fighting fitness adversity

Never go to bed mad. Stay up and fight.

—Phyllis Diller

humor relationships fighting

In a quarrel, each side is right.

—Yiddish folk saying

right opinions fighting

My conscience aches, but it's going to lose the fight.

—Allanah Myles

conscience fighting

There are plenty of good reasons for fighting… but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where's evil? It's that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side.

—Kurt Vonnegut

hate God evil fighting

History

22 Feb 2015 Added
26 Oct 2026 Wording changed

Previous wording

Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it's cracked up to be. That's why people are so cynical about it. . . . It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more.