Carolyn Heilbrun Quotes
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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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You can flush my ashes down the toilet, for all I care.
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Upon becoming fifty the one thing you can't afford is habit.
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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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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.
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Quoting, like smoking, is a dirty habit to which I am devoted.
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Power consists to a large extent in deciding what stories will be told.
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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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Maturity ... is letting things happen.
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Ideas move fast when their time comes.
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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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Normal is absolutely my least favorite word.
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What one remembers is, I think, a clue to what one wants to be.
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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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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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A literary academic can no more pass a bookstore than an alcoholic can pass a bar.
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Everyone likes to talk shop, which is the most interesting talk in the world, in the beginning.
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All good marriages are remarriages.
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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.
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The married are those who have taken the terrible risk of intimacy and, having taken it, know life without intimacy to be impossible.
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One sank into the ancient sin of anomie when challenges failed.
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We in middle age require adventure.
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One hires lawyers as on hires plumbers, because one wants to keep one's hands off the beastly drains.
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It's hard to be happy, and safe, and applauded in a miserable world.