Poetry is the language we speak in the most terrifying or ecstatic passages of our lives. But the very word poetry scares people. They think of their grade school teachers reciting 'Hiawatha' and they groan.

Erica Jong
Some Similar Quotes
  1. The language of love letters is the same as suicide notes. - Courtney Love

  2. Language is the key to the heart of people. - Ahmed Deedat

  3. You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect. - John Green

  4. I have written it before and am not ashamed to write it again. Without Wodehouse I am not sure that I would be a tenth of what I am today -- whatever that may be. In my teenage years, his writings awoke me to the... - Stephen Fry

  5. All this twaddle, the existence of God, atheism, determinism, liberation, societies, death, etc., are pieces of a chess game called language, and they are amusing only if one does not preoccupy oneself with 'winning or losing this game of chess. - Marcel Duchamp

More Quotes By Erica Jong
  1. 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...

  2. I have accepted fear as part of life — specifically the fear of change... I have gone ahead despite the pounding in the heart that says: turn back....

  3. The body is wiser than its inhabitants. the body is the soul. the body is god’s messenger.

  4. Show me a woman who doesn't feel guilty and I'll show you a man.

  5. Critics write out of intellectual exercise, not poets. Poets write straight from the heart.

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