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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
In former days, everyone found the assumption of innocence so easy; today we find fatally easy the assumption of guilt. — Carolyn Heilbrun Copy Share Image
“. . . the less androgynous the person, the likelier he or she was to be incapable of action if the appropriate action was not clearly delineated . . . How many women there were . . . who tore themselves or their families apart because they could not allow themselves any action or occupation that could appear manly, and might make their husbands appear less so. [pp. 132-133]” — Carolyn Heilbrun Copy Share
“But will anyone again look at that tree, read that poem, love a dog in quite my way? I am a particular and, despite the commonness of all people, a unique person in the way I perceive and think and appreciate, and I am sad that this particularity shall before too long be gone. This is not arrogance; it is… — Carolyn Heilbrun Copy Share
Ardent, intelligent, sweet, sensitive, cultivated, erudite. These are the adjectives of praise in an androgynous world. Those who consider them epithets of shame or… — Carolyn Heilbrun Copy Share Image
Quoting, like smoking, ... is a dirty habit to which I am devoted. But then ... I am a professor of English literature; it… — Carolyn Heilbrun Copy Share Image
That is the point of quotations. One can use another's words to be insulting. — Carolyn Heilbrun Copy Share Image
a revolutionary marriage ... [is] one in which both partners have work at the center of their lives and must find a delicate balance… — Carolyn Heilbrun Copy Share Image
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… — Carolyn Heilbrun Copy Share Image