Fear of Dying Quotes

“If I got rid of my demons, I’d lose my angels. —Tennessee Williams”
― Erica Jong, Fear of Dying

“think about how impossible it is to explain to the young what happens when you know you’re not immune from death. Everything changes. You look at the world differently. When you’re young, you have no perspective. You think life lasts forever—days and months and years stretching out to infinity. You think you don’t have to choose. You think you can waste time doing drugs and alcohol. You think time will always be on your side. But time, once your friend, becomes your enemy. It gallops by as you get older. Holidays come faster and faster. Years fly off the calendar as in old movies. All you long for is to go back and do it all over, correct the mistakes,”
― Erica Jong, Fear of Dying

“The truth is we all want to be known. And we're simultaneously afraid of it. We want to be unmasked, and the person who can unmask us wins our respect.”
― Erica Jong, Fear of Dying

“I discovered the secret of writing - live in the present moment. Do not fantasize about possible response because you cannot know the future.”
― Erica Jong, Fear of Dying

“Who were my fictitious witches and what did they mean? Never ask that of yourself while writing. It may stop you cold. Just trust that if you believe in your characters, others will too. ... Whenever I thought too critically about my work, I couldn't write.”
― Erica Jong, Fear of Dying

“Glitch or not, we seem to need a power greater than ourselves. We seem to need enormous shadows of divinity stalking us. We know we are weak. Alcoholics are, above all, lonely, fearful pepole who make a fetish of loneliness, who think they--we--are too good to be part of the human race. And we have to be humbled to remember who we are--stumbling human beings, more ape than angel.”
― Erica Jong, Fear of Dying

“The Greeks—who knew everything—knew that immortality without youth was to be feared rather than desired.”
― Erica Jong, Fear of Dying

“It's impossible to generalize about sexuality - even one's own. The only way to keep it pure is to keep it unspoken. Keep it out of words. Words are not where sexuality lives. Without privacy, there is no ecstasy.”
― Erica Jong, Fear of Dying

“How do you help anyone die? I read with amazement the stories of people who reached a certain point of illness or of age and decided it was time to die. It seems the height of both courage and cruelty. Courage because anything so counterintuitive takes courage. And cruelty because it leaves your children wondering if they did something wrong. There's no act you can initiate that doesn't involve other people. We are all interwoven. Even the most rational suicide may come as a blow to someone else.”
― Erica Jong, Fear of Dying

“You must be very specific in your wishes or they’ll come back to haunt you.”
― Erica Jong, Fear of Dying

“You know, when you get old, you see that everything is a joke. All the things you were passionate about don't mean a thing. You only did them to keep busy.”
― Erica Jong, Fear of Dying

“Not long ago, I reread Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian. I was amazed to discover what she had written in her note about the difficult composition of the book--which had taken her many decades:

Another thing virtually impossible, to take a feminine character as a central figure… Women's lives are much too limited or else too secret. If a woman does recount her own life she is promptly reproached for no longer being truly feminine.

We all struggle with this--still. The woman who chooses to write disguised as a male character is hoping to avoid the problem. But you cannot avoid the problem of being a woman.”
― Erica Jong, Fear of Dying

“Why is it so hard to be human being? I wonder. Why do we have to surrender? And to what? What if you refused to believe in a higher power? What if you thought you were the only trustworthy higher power? I have done that all my life and I know it doesn't work. You are not enough. Your will is not enough. But God? God is a pagan dream, conjured out of neediness.”
― Erica Jong, Fear of Dying

“What is the arc of the plot of one's life? I want! I want!”
― Erica Jong, Fear of Dying

“I think we are clinging with ever-increasing desperation to our status as children. In the hospital you see other children—children of fifty, of sixty, of seventy—clinging to their parents of eighty, ninety, one hundred. Is all this clinging love? Or is it just the need to be reassured of your own immunity from the contagion of the Moloch ha-moves—the dread Angel of Death? Because we all secretly believe in our own immortality. Since we cannot imagine the loss of individual consciousness, we cannot possibly imagine death.”
― Erica Jong, Fear of Dying