Carolyn Heilbrun Quotes
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Quoting, like smoking, is a dirty habit to which I am devoted.
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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.
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Upon becoming fifty the one thing you can't afford is habit.
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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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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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Maturity ... is letting things happen.
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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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Power consists to a large extent in deciding what stories will be told.
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All good marriages are remarriages.
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That is the point of quotations. One can use another's words to be insulting.
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What one remembers is, I think, a clue to what one wants to be.
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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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A literary academic can no more pass a bookstore than an alcoholic can pass a bar.
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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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Ideas move fast when their time comes.
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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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Normal is absolutely my least favorite word.
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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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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.
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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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Professors of literature collect books the way a ship collects barnacles, without seeming effort.
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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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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.