"The trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more"
About this Quote
Jong’s line lands because it flips the usual risk calculus into a trapdoor: the “safe” choice isn’t neutral, it’s an active gamble with a bigger stake. The phrasing is conversational - “The trouble is” sounds like a friend leaning in, not a lecturer - but it carries a novelist’s instinct for paradox. By repeating “risk” in two clauses, she forces the reader to hear how easily the word becomes a refuge. We tell ourselves we’re avoiding danger when we’re really choosing a slower, quieter kind of loss.
The subtext is especially Jong: a critique of the social machinery that trains people, particularly women in her cultural moment, to equate caution with virtue. Coming of age in the postwar U.S., then writing through the sexual revolution and second-wave feminism, Jong spent a career poking at the costs of compliance - the way “security” can be a polite synonym for self-erasure. The quote doesn’t romanticize recklessness; it reframes passivity as its own form of extremity. Not choosing is still a choice, and often the one made on your behalf.
Intent-wise, it’s a nudge toward agency in the broadest sense: creative risk, erotic risk, emotional risk, career risk. The sentence makes that expansive without naming any one arena, which is why it travels so well as advice. It doesn’t promise reward; it warns about the bill you rack up by trying to avoid one.
The subtext is especially Jong: a critique of the social machinery that trains people, particularly women in her cultural moment, to equate caution with virtue. Coming of age in the postwar U.S., then writing through the sexual revolution and second-wave feminism, Jong spent a career poking at the costs of compliance - the way “security” can be a polite synonym for self-erasure. The quote doesn’t romanticize recklessness; it reframes passivity as its own form of extremity. Not choosing is still a choice, and often the one made on your behalf.
Intent-wise, it’s a nudge toward agency in the broadest sense: creative risk, erotic risk, emotional risk, career risk. The sentence makes that expansive without naming any one arena, which is why it travels so well as advice. It doesn’t promise reward; it warns about the bill you rack up by trying to avoid one.
Quote Details
| Topic | Motivational |
|---|---|
| Source | Fear of Flying, Erica Jong, 1973 (novel — commonly cited source for the line "The trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more"). |
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