Carolyn Heilbrun Quotes (17 Quotes)

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

Ideas move rapidly when their time comes.

Quoting, like smoking, is a dirty habit to which I am devoted.

Life has this in common with prizefighting if you've received a belly blow, it's likely to be followed by a right to the jaw.

The Freudian view that accomplished women are sexually men, or trying to be, has done more, I suspect, than any other misconception to doom women to fear of accomplishment and selfhood.

That's the point of quotations, you know one can use another's words to be insulting.

Today's shocks are tomorrow's conventions.

. . . a relationship has a momentum, it must change and develop, and will tend to move toward the point of greatest commitment.

As E.M. Forster so brilliantly put it, 'It is difficult, after accepting six cups of tea, to throw the seventh in the face of your hostess.' Sometimes the only way to live is to get out, or at least seriously contemplate getting out, doing the impossible, flinging the conventional tea.

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

You can flush my ashes down the toilet, for all I care.

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

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 acknowledged - 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.

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.

The married are those who have taken the terrible risk of intimacy and, having taken it, know life without intimacy to be impossible.

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.

We in middle age require adventure.