Carolyn Heilbrun Quotes
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Only a marriage with partners strong enough to risk divorce is strong enough to avoid it.
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What marks a writer is this: until she - or he, of course - writes down whatever happened, turns it into a story, it hasn't really happened, it hasn't shape, form, reality.
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one sank into the ancient sin of anomie when challenges failed.
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Normal is absolutely my least favorite word.
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Whether animals admit it or not, they and I communicate.
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Quoting, like smoking, ... is a dirty habit to which I am devoted. But then ... I am a professor of English literature; it is an occupational hazard.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Once you are thought selfish, not only are you forgiven a life designed mainly to suit yourself, which in anyone else would appear monstrous, but if an impulse to generosity should by chance overpower you, you will get five times the credit of some poor selfless soul who has been oozing kindness for years.
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That is the point of quotations. One can use another's words to be insulting.
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We cannot guess the outcome of our actions... Which is why our actions must always be acceptable in themselves, and not as strategies.
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Most full lives are filled with empty gestures.
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Professors of literature collect books the way a ship collects barnacles, without seeming effort.
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Male friends do not always face each other; they stand side by side, facing the world.
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A dog is the only exercise machine you cannot decide to skip when you don't feel like it.
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Shifting problems is the first rule for a long and pleasant life.
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You can flush my ashes down the toilet, for all I care.
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A literary academic can no more pass a bookstore than an alcoholic can pass a bar.
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Ideas move fast when their time comes.
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... success always worries academics, when it moves into the popular world.
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People who are genuinely involved in life, not just living a routine they've contrived to protect them from disaster, always seem to have more demanded of them than they can easily take on.
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One cannot make up stories; one can only retell in new ways the stories one has already heard.
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Upon becoming fifty the one thing you can't afford is habit.
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as the years go on a sense of deep patience comes over one; one seems to know the virtue of ripeness, and the danger of rushing events.
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. . . a relationship has a momentum, it must change and develop, and will tend to move toward the point of greatest commitment.
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Ironically, women who acquire power are more likely to be criticized for it than are the men who have always had it.
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We in middle age require adventure.
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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.
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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]
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