Carolyn G. Heilbrun Quotes

#1. Many of us feel alone and assaulted by the meaninglessness of what we are doing. But, at such times, we are doing; the problem is not a lack of activity with a point, but rather questions about the point of the activity.

Carolyn G. Heilbrun

#2. Ours is a long marriage, and we have found solitude together. [p. 23]

Carolyn G. Heilbrun

#3. All good marriages are remarriages.

Carolyn G. Heilbrun

#4. Men are not listeners ... They hear what they expect to hear, or want to hear, or are certain they will hear, and women, being supple creatures trained to please, have often told them what we women knew would satisfy them. [p. 167]

Carolyn G. Heilbrun

#5. Power is the ability to take one's place in whatever discourse is essential to action and the right to have one's part matter.

Carolyn G. Heilbrun

#6. Professors of literature collect books the way a ship collects barnacles, without seeming effort.

Carolyn G. Heilbrun

#7. Unfortunately, power is something that women abjure once they perceive the great difference between the lives possible to men and to women ...

Carolyn G. Heilbrun

#8. To continue what one had been doing
which was Dante's idea of hell
is, I came to see, and the vision frightened me, easy in one's sixties.

Carolyn G. Heilbrun

#9. With solitude, however, fervently it is desired and embraced, comes loneliness. T. H White, the author, offered advice to those in sadness
learn something new.

Carolyn G. Heilbrun

#10. Is this true? Those who had world' enough, that is, those engaged in a demanding daily vocation, were short of time while those without regular obligations had more than sufficient time, but no world?

Carolyn G. Heilbrun

#11. What one remembers is, I think, a clue to what one wants to be.

Carolyn G. Heilbrun

#12. Ideas move fast when their time comes.

Carolyn G. Heilbrun

#13. A literary academic can no more pass a bookstore than an alcoholic can pass a bar.

Carolyn G. Heilbrun

#14. Power consists to a large extent in deciding what stories will be told.

Carolyn G. Heilbrun

#15. If an animal is designed by nature to have claws it ought to keep them, and if men come with quirks that they are incapable of changing, well, a certain amount of quietude and even peace can be achieved by just realizing that it's all inherent in the beast. [p. 173]

Carolyn G. Heilbrun