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A literary academic can no more pass a bookstore than an alcoholic can pass a bar.
Carolyn Heilbrun -
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.
Carolyn Heilbrun
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Quoting, like smoking, is a dirty habit to which I am devoted.
Carolyn Heilbrun -
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.
Carolyn Heilbrun -
Power consists to a large extent in deciding what stories will be told.
Carolyn Heilbrun -
Upon becoming fifty the one thing you can't afford is habit.
Carolyn Heilbrun -
What one remembers is, I think, a clue to what one wants to be.
Carolyn Heilbrun -
In former days, everyone found the assumption of innocence so easy; today we find fatally easy the assumption of guilt.
Carolyn Heilbrun
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One hires lawyers as on hires plumbers, because one wants to keep one's hands off the beastly drains.
Carolyn Heilbrun -
One sank into the ancient sin of anomie when challenges failed.
Carolyn Heilbrun -
Professors of literature collect books the way a ship collects barnacles, without seeming effort.
Carolyn Heilbrun -
That is the point of quotations. One can use another's words to be insulting.
Carolyn Heilbrun -
Most full lives are filled with empty gestures.
Carolyn Heilbrun -
Maturity ... is letting things happen.
Carolyn Heilbrun
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Unfortunately, power is something that women abjure once they perceive the great difference between the lives possible to men and to women...
Carolyn Heilbrun -
Everyone likes to talk shop, which is the most interesting talk in the world, in the beginning.
Carolyn Heilbrun -
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.
Carolyn Heilbrun -
Normal is absolutely my least favorite word.
Carolyn Heilbrun -
Is there any vanity greater than the vanity of those who believe themselves without it?
Carolyn Heilbrun -
Ironically, women who acquire power are more likely to be criticized for it than are the men who have always had it.
Carolyn Heilbrun
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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.
Carolyn Heilbrun -
Ideas move fast when their time comes.
Carolyn Heilbrun -
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.
Carolyn Heilbrun -
It's hard to be happy, and safe, and applauded in a miserable world.
Carolyn Heilbrun