Carolyn Heilbrun Quotes
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Today's shocks are tomorrow's conventions.
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With solitude, however, fervently it is desired and embraced, comes loneliness. T. H White, the author, offered advice to those in sadness - learn something new.
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Whether animals admit it or not, they and I communicate.
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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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Cynic' is the sentimentalist's name for the realist.
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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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Androgyny suggests a spirit of reconciliation between the sexes.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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In former days, everyone found the assumption of innocence so easy; today we find fatally easy the assumption of guilt.
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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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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.
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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.
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Thinking about profound social change, conservatives always expect disaster, while revolutionaries confidently anticipate utopia. Both are wrong.
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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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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.
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Shifting problems is the first rule for a long and pleasant life.
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Male friends do not always face each other; they stand side by side, facing the world.
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You can flush my ashes down the toilet, for all I care.
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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.
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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.