Explore Quotes by 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.

Professors of literature collect books the way a ship collects barnacles, without seeming effort.

A literary academic can no more pass a bookstore than an alcoholic can pass a bar.

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.

One hires lawyers as on hires plumbers, because one wants to keep one's hands off the beastly drains.

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.

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. [p. 138]

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.

As long as women are isolated one from the other, not allowed to offer other women the most personal accounts of their lives, they will not be part of any narratives of their own…women will be staving off destiny and not inviting or inventing or controlling it.

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.

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.

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.

Normal is absolutely my least favorite word.

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

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

Today's shocks are tomorrow's conventions.

Whether deliberately, unconsciously or accidentally, she seems to have composed her own life so that its fitful, rudderless, and self-doubting first half was alchemized into gold when the austere bluestocking became the fallen woman.

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

That is the point of quotations. One can use another's words to be insulting.

Ideas move fast when their time comes.

We in middle age require adventure.