All Carolyn Heilbrun Quotes
- We in middle age require adventure. Adventure
- Ideas move fast when their time comes. Fast
- That is the point of quotations. One can use another's words to be insulting. Inspirational
- Ironically, women who acquire power are more likely to be criticized for it than are the men who have always had it. Acquire
- 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… Accidentally
- You can flush my ashes down the toilet, for all I care. All
- Today's shocks are tomorrow's conventions. Conventions
- The married are those who have taken the terrible risk of intimacy and, having taken it, know life without intimacy to be impossible. Impossible
- Normal is absolutely my least favorite word. Absolutely
- 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. Better
- 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… Adjectives
- 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… Accounts
- 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… Androgyny
- 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. Ability
- 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… Acknowledge
- 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… Affair
- One hires lawyers as on hires plumbers, because one wants to keep one's hands off the beastly drains. Beastly
- 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… Exclusively
- 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:… Androgyny
- Whether animals admit it or not, they and I communicate, Admit
- 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… Beyond
- 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… Act
- The journey is over. Love to all. All
- Quoting, like smoking, is a dirty habit to which I am devoted. Devoted
- Professors of literature collect books the way a ship collects barnacles, without seeming effort. Barnacles