Carolyn Heilbrun famous quotes

A literary academic can no more pass a bookstore than an alcoholic can pass a bar.
-- Carolyn Heilbrun

#Inspirational #Humorous #Book

Power consists to a large extent in deciding what stories will be told.
-- Carolyn Heilbrun

#Stories

Ideas move fast when their time comes.
-- Carolyn Heilbrun

#Moving #Ideas

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

#Taken #Risk #Impossible

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

#Sisterhood #Men #He Man

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

#Leadership #Sweet #Revenge

The journey is over. Love to all.
-- Carolyn Heilbrun

#Journey

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 Heilbrun

#Simple #Men #Choices

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

#Men #Race #Understanding

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

#Hands #Law #Want

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 Heilbrun

#Running #Jobs #Simple

Whether animals admit it or not, they and I communicate,
-- Carolyn Heilbrun

#Animal #Communicate

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

#Jobs #Tea #Flavor

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

#Real #Taken #Eden

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

#Age #Fifty #Becoming

A dog is the only exercise machine you cannot decide to skip when you don't feel like it.
-- Carolyn Heilbrun

#Fitness #Dog #Exercise

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

#Marriage #Support #Balance

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

#Marriage #Player #Law

Only a marriage with partners strong enough to risk divorce is strong enough to avoid it.
-- Carolyn Heilbrun

#Marriage #Strong #Divorce

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

#Believe #Struggle #Writing

Androgyny suggests a spirit of reconciliation between the sexes; it suggests, further, a full range of experience…it suggests a spectrum upon which human beings choose their places without regard to propriety or custom.
-- Carolyn Heilbrun

#Sex #Spirit #Androgyny

Quoting, like smoking, is a dirty habit to which I am devoted.
-- Carolyn Heilbrun

#Dirty #Marijuana #Naughty

Professors of literature collect books the way a ship collects barnacles, without seeming effort.
-- Carolyn Heilbrun

#Book #Effort #Way

We women have lived too much with closure: "If he notices me, if I marry him, if I get into college, if I get this work accepted, if I get this job" -- there always seems to loom the possibility of something being over, settled, sweeping clear the way for contentment. This is the delusion of a passive life. When the hope for closure is abandoned, when there is an end to fantasy, adventure for women will begin.
-- Carolyn Heilbrun

#Jobs #Adventure #College

We in middle age require adventure.
-- Carolyn Heilbrun

#Adventure #Age #Funny Travel

That is the point of quotations. One can use another's words to be insulting.
-- Carolyn Heilbrun

#Insulting #Use #Quotations

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

#Life #Self #Doubt

You can flush my ashes down the toilet, for all I care.
-- Carolyn Heilbrun

#Ashes #Toilets #Care

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

#Destiny #Long #Narrative

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 Heilbrun

#Matter #Essentials #Action

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

#Home #Single Life #Together

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

#Thinking #Profound #Revolutionary

Normal is absolutely my least favorite word.
-- Carolyn Heilbrun

#Serious #Normal

Today's shocks are tomorrow's conventions.
-- Carolyn Heilbrun

#Today #Tomorrow #Conventions

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

#Sex #Men #Individual

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

#Sex #Spirit #Gender

The compulsion to find a lover and husband in a single person has doomed more women to misery than any other illusion.
-- Carolyn Heilbrun

#Marriage #Husband #Lovers

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

#Friends #Men #Males

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

#Marriage #Betrayal #Long