Carolyn Heilbrun Quotes

A literary academic can no more pass a bookstore than an alcoholic can pass a bar.

Power consists to a large extent in deciding what stories will be told.

the term 'androgyny' ... defines a condition under which the characteristics of the sexes, and the human impulses expressed by men and women, are not rigidly assigned. Androgyny seeks to liberate the individual from the confines of the appropriate.

The compulsion to find a lover and husband in a single person has doomed more women to misery than any other illusion.

Ideas move fast when their time comes.

Normal is absolutely my least favorite word.

The sign of a good marriage is that everything is debatable and challenged; nothing is turned into law or policy. The rules, if any, are known only to the two players, who seek no public trophies.

Quoting, like smoking, is a dirty habit to which I am devoted.

Most full lives are filled with empty gestures.

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.

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.

Today's shocks are tomorrow's conventions.

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.

Why do long marriages occasionally endow their inhabitants with a rare kind of equilibrium otherwise almost unknown in human relations? My guess is that the value of the moment has at last overshadowed the long history of resentments, betrayals, and boredom.

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.

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.

Is there any vanity greater than the vanity of those who believe themselves without it?

Androgyny suggests a spirit of reconciliation between the sexes.

Thinking about profound social change, conservatives always expect disaster, while revolutionaries confidently anticipate utopia. Both are wrong.

The married are those who have taken the terrible risk of intimacy and, having taken it, know life without intimacy to be impossible.

We women have lived too much with closure: "If he notices me, if I marry him, if I get into college, if I get this work accepted, if I get this job" -- there always seems to loom the possibility of something being over, settled, sweeping clear the way for contentment. This is the delusion of a passive life. When the hope for closure is abandoned, when there is an end to fantasy, adventure for women will begin.

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

We in middle age require adventure.

A dog is the only exercise machine you cannot decide to skip when you don't feel like it.

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