Carolyn Heilbrun

We cannot guess the outcome of our actions... Which is why our actions must always be acceptable in themselves, and not as…

— 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…

— Carolyn Heilbrun

In former days, everyone found the assumption of innocence so easy; today we find fatally easy the assumption of guilt.

— Carolyn Heilbrun

“. . . the less androgynous the person, the likelier he or she was to be incapable of action if the appropriate…

— Carolyn Heilbrun

“But will anyone again look at that tree, read that poem, love a dog in quite my way? I am a particular…

— Carolyn Heilbrun

maturity ... is letting things happen.

— Carolyn Heilbrun

one sank into the ancient sin of anomie when challenges failed.

— Carolyn Heilbrun

Ardent, intelligent, sweet, sensitive, cultivated, erudite. These are the adjectives of praise in an androgynous world. Those who consider them epithets of…

— Carolyn Heilbrun

Quoting, like smoking, ... is a dirty habit to which I am devoted. But then ... I am a professor of English…

— Carolyn Heilbrun

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

— Carolyn Heilbrun

a revolutionary marriage ... [is] one in which both partners have work at the center of their lives and must find a…

— 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…

— Carolyn Heilbrun

What marks a writer is this: until she - or he, of course - writes down whatever happened, turns it into a…

— Carolyn Heilbrun

Whether deliberately, unconsciously or accidentally, she seems to have composed her own life so that its fitful, rudderless, and self-doubting first half…

— Carolyn Heilbrun

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

— Carolyn Heilbrun

Why do long marriages occasionally endow their inhabitants with a rare kind of equilibrium otherwise almost unknown in human relations? My guess…

— Carolyn Heilbrun

Cynic' is the sentimentalist's name for the realist.

— Carolyn Heilbrun

“. . . for those retired, with too much time and no world, a world must be found, and not necessarily one…

— Carolyn Heilbrun

as the years go on a sense of deep patience comes over one; one seems to know the virtue of ripeness, and…

— Carolyn Heilbrun

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

— Carolyn Heilbrun

“All good marriages are remarriages.”

— Carolyn Heilbrun

. . . a relationship has a momentum, it must change and develop, and will tend to move toward the point of greatest commitment.

— Carolyn Heilbrun

“Sadness such as mine is not depression; it can be blown away by an interesting conversation, a welcome telephone call, or a…

— Carolyn Heilbrun

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

— Carolyn Heilbrun

“Men are not listeners . . . They hear what they expect to hear, or want to hear, or are certain they…

— Carolyn Heilbrun