Carolyn Heilbrun Quotes - Page 2

Ironically, women who acquire power are more likely to be criticized for it than are the men who have always had it.

The journey is over. Love to all.

... success always worries academics, when it moves into the popular world.

Shifting problems is the first rule for a long and pleasant life.

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

maturity ... is letting things happen.

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: in both, the whole point is choice.

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.

Whether animals admit it or not, they and I communicate.

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

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 contemplate getting out, doing the impossible,flinging the conventional tea.

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.

One hires lawyers as on hires plumbers, because one wants to keep one's hands off the beastly drains.

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.

One cannot make up stories; one can only retell in new ways the stories one has already heard.

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 their places without regard to propriety or custom.

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

New York is not like London, a now-and-then place to many people. You can either not live in New York or not live anyplace else. One is either a lover or hater.

Professors of literature collect books the way a ship collects barnacles, without seeming effort.

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.

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.

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

It's hard to be happy, and safe, and applauded in a miserable world.

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

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