Carolyn Heilbrun Quotes

42 Sourced Quotes

Quoting, like smoking…is a dirty habit to which I am devoted. But then…I am a professor of English literature; it is an occupational hazard.

Carolyn Heilbrun
That's the point of quotations, you know: one can use another's words to be insulting.

Carolyn Heilbrun
The genuine solitaries of life fear intimacy more than loneliness. The married are those who have taken the terrible risk of intimacy and, having taken it, know life without intimacy to be impossible.

Carolyn Heilbrun
Ironically, women who acquire power are more likely to be criticized for it than are the men who have always had it.

Carolyn Heilbrun
One hires lawyers as one hires plumbers, because one wants to keep one's hands off the beastly drains.

Carolyn Heilbrun
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
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
Androgyny suggests a spirit of reconciliation between the sexes.

Carolyn Heilbrun
I suspect you of being a born schoolteacher, something apparently rarer in our day than a fine glass blower, and infinitely more desirable.

Carolyn Heilbrun
Thinking about profound social change, conservatives always expect disaster, while revolutionaries confidently anticipate utopia. Both are wrong.

Carolyn Heilbrun
Everyone likes to talk shop, which is the most interesting talk in the world, in the beginning.

Carolyn Heilbrun
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
Women, I believe, search for fellow beings who have faced similar struggles, conveyed them in ways a reader can transform into her own life, confirmed desires the reader had hardly acknowledge-desires that now seem possible. Women catch courage from the women whose lives and writings they read, and women call the bearer of that courage friend. [p. 138]

Carolyn Heilbrun
The rare, delicate flavor of a life after retiring in one's sixties, whatever one has "retired" from, the pleasure I experienced beyond my job at Columbia, is a gift of life in the last decades. but it is not easily learned.... But sometimes, the only way to live is to get out, or at least seriously to contemplate getting out, doing the impossible,flinging the conventional tea.

Carolyn Heilbrun
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
Male friends do not always face each other; they stand side by side, facing the world.

Carolyn Heilbrun
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
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
Upon becoming fifty the one thing you can't afford is habit.

Carolyn Heilbrun
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
Women are liberated the moment they stop caring what other women think of them.

Carolyn Heilbrun
One cannot make up stories; one can only retell in new ways the stories one has already heard.

Carolyn Heilbrun
Once you are thought selfish, not only are you forgiven a life designed mainly to suit yourself, which in anyone else would appear monstrous, but if an impulse to generosity should by chance overpower you, you will get five times the credit of some poor selfless soul who has been oozing kindness for years.

Carolyn Heilbrun
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
Success always worries academics, when it moves into the popular world.

Carolyn Heilbrun
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
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
They were famous: demands were made upon them. Solitude meant escape from the importuning of strangers.

Carolyn Heilbrun
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
Since we did not wish to die, surely we must have wished to grow old?

Carolyn Heilbrun