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