Love Quote by Erica Jong

Jong doesn’t romanticize courage as the absence of fear; she demotes fear to a roommate you stop arguing with. The first move is managerial: “accepted fear as a part of life.” It’s a refusal of the self-help fantasy that a clean, confident self is waiting on the other side of enough willpower. By naming “specifically the fear of change,” she points at the fear that masquerades as prudence, the kind that can be defended with spreadsheets and moral language while it quietly keeps your life small.

Then she pivots to the body. “Pounding in the heart” isn’t metaphor so much as evidence. Fear isn’t an idea to outthink; it’s a physical alarm system firing in a situation that might actually be good for you. The sentence stages a real-time standoff between instinct (“turn back”) and decision (“I have gone ahead”). That tension is the engine: she doesn’t claim transcendence, she claims motion.

The subtext carries Jong’s larger cultural context as a novelist associated with second-wave feminism and the politics of female desire and self-definition. For women in particular, “change” often means paying a social price: being called selfish, difficult, unfeminine, too much. Jong’s intent is to normalize the cost - the tremor, the bodily resistance - while insisting it’s not a veto. The line reads like a private pep talk written in public ink, making fear legible without granting it authority.