Top 65 Carolyn Heilbrun Quotes
#3. The compulsion to find a lover and husband in a single person has doomed more women to misery than any other illusion.
Carolyn Heilbrun
#4. In former days, everyone found the assumption of innocence so easy; today we find fatally easy the assumption of guilt.
Carolyn Heilbrun
#5. 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
#6. As the years go on a sense of deep patience comes over one; one seems to know the virtue of ripeness, and the danger of rushing events.
Carolyn Heilbrun
#7. Upon becoming fifty the one thing you can't afford is habit.
Carolyn Heilbrun
#10. Ironically, women who acquire power are more likely to be criticized for it than are the men who have always had it.
Carolyn Gold Heilbrun
#11. People who are genuinely involved in life, not just living a routine they've contrived to protect them from disaster, always seem to have more demanded of them than they can easily take on.
Carolyn Heilbrun
#12. One hires lawyers as on hires plumbers, because one wants to keep one's hands off the beastly drains.
Carolyn Heilbrun
#13. Success always worries academics, when it moves into the popular world.
Carolyn Heilbrun
#15. New York is not like London, a now-and-then place to many people. You can either not live in New York or not live anyplace else. One is either a lover or hater.
Carolyn Heilbrun
#16. Androgyny suggests a spirit of reconciliation between the sexes ...
Carolyn Heilbrun
#20. Male friends do not always face each other; they stand side by side, facing the world.
Carolyn Heilbrun
#21. Today's youth seem finally to have understood that only by freeing woman from her exclusively sexual role can man free himself from his ordained role in the rat-race: that of the rat.
Carolyn Heilbrun
#22. 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
#23. Thinking about profound social change, conservatives always expect disaster, while revolutionaries confidently anticipate utopia. Both are wrong.
Carolyn Heilbrun
#24. 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
#25. A revolutionary marriage ... [is] one in which both partners have work at the center of their lives and must find a delicate balance that can support both together and each individually.
Carolyn Heilbrun
#26. Professors of literature collect books the way a ship collects barnacles, without seeming effort.
Carolyn G. Heilbrun
#27. Whether deliberately, unconsciously or accidentally, she seems to have composed her own life so that its fitful, rudderless, and self-doubting first half was alchemized into gold when the austere bluestocking became the fallen woman.
Carolyn Heilbrun
#28. Shifting problems is the first rule for a long and pleasant life.
Carolyn Heilbrun
#29. Nostalgia is a dangerous emotion, both because it is powerless to act in the real world, and because it glides so easily into hatred and resentment against those who have taken our Eden from us.
Carolyn Heilbrun
#30. To recommend that women become identical to men, would be simple reversal, and would defeat the whole point of androgyny, and for that matter, feminism: in both, the whole point is choice.
Carolyn Gold Heilbrun
#31. A relationship has a momentum, it must change and develop, and will tend to move toward the point of greatest commitment.
Carolyn Heilbrun
#32. A dog is the only exercise machine you cannot decide to skip when you don't feel like it.
Carolyn Heilbrun
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. Everyone likes to talk shop, which is the most interesting talk in the world, in the beginning.
Carolyn Heilbrun
#37. Odd, the years it took to learn one simple fact: that the prize just ahead, the next job, publication, love affair, marriage always seemed to hold the key to satisfaction but never, in the longer run, sufficed.
Carolyn Gold Heilbrun
#38. I don't know why togetherness was ever held up as an ideal of marriage. Away from home for both, then together, that's much better.
Carolyn Heilbrun
#39. One cannot make up stories; one can only retell in new ways the stories one has already heard.
Carolyn Heilbrun
#40. Is there any vanity greater than the vanity of those who believe themselves without it?
Carolyn Heilbrun
#41. The sign of a good marriage is that everything is debatable and challenged; nothing is turned into law or policy. The rules, if any, are known only to the two players, who seek no public trophies.
Carolyn Heilbrun
#42. 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
#43. 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
#46. What marks a writer is this: until she - or he, of course - writes down whatever happened, turns it into a story, it hasn't really happened, it hasn't shape, form, reality.
Carolyn Heilbrun
#48. The term 'androgyny' ... defines a condition under which the characteristics of the sexes, and the human impulses expressed by men and women, are not rigidly assigned. Androgyny seeks to liberate the individual from the confines of the appropriate.
Carolyn Heilbrun
#50. Ardent, intelligent, sweet, sensitive, cultivated, erudite. These are the adjectives of praise in an androgynous world. Those who consider them epithets of shame or folly ought not to be trusted with leadership, for they will be men hot for power and revenge, certain of right and wrong.
Carolyn Heilbrun
#53. As long as women are isolated one from the other, not allowed to offer other women the most personal accounts of their lives, they will not be part of any narratives of their own ... women will be staving off destiny and not inviting or inventing or controlling it.
Carolyn Heilbrun
#54. A literary academic can no more pass a bookstore than an alcoholic can pass a bar.
Carolyn G. Heilbrun
#55. Power consists to a large extent in deciding what stories will be told.
Carolyn G. Heilbrun
#56. It's hard to be happy, and safe, and applauded in a miserable world.
Carolyn Heilbrun
#57. Only a marriage with partners strong enough to risk divorce is strong enough to avoid it.
Carolyn Heilbrun
#58. The married are those who have taken the terrible risk of intimacy and, having taken it, know life without intimacy to be impossible.
Carolyn Gold Heilbrun
#59. Why do long marriages occasionally endow their inhabitants with a rare kind of equilibrium otherwise almost unknown in human relations? My guess is that the value of the moment has at last overshadowed the long history of resentments, betrayals, and boredom.
Carolyn Heilbrun
#60. We cannot guess the outcome of our actions ... Which is why our actions must always be acceptable in themselves, and not as strategies.
Carolyn Heilbrun
#61. 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
#62. Life has this in common with prizefighting: if you've received a belly blow, it's likely to be followed by a right to the jaw.
Carolyn Heilbrun
#63. One sank into the ancient sin of anomie when challenges failed.
Carolyn Heilbrun
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