Carolyn Heilbrun Quotes & Sayings

Is there any vanity greater than the vanity of those who believe themselves without it? — Carolyn Heilbrun

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. — Carolyn Heilbrun

Everyone likes to talk shop, which is the most interesting talk in the world, in the beginning. — Carolyn Heilbrun

Cynic' is the sentimentalist's name for the realist. — Carolyn Heilbrun

Success always worries academics, when it moves into the popular world. — 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

A dog is the only exercise machine you cannot decide to skip when you don't feel like it. — Carolyn Heilbrun

Why do long marriages occasionally endow their inhabitants with a rare kind of equilibrium otherwise almost unknown in human relations? My guess is that the value of the moment has at last overshadowed the long history of resentments, betrayals, and boredom. — 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

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. — Carolyn Heilbrun

Only a marriage with partners strong enough to risk divorce is strong enough to avoid it. — Carolyn Heilbrun

Male friends do not always face each other; they stand side by side, facing the world. — Carolyn Heilbrun

In former days, everyone found the assumption of innocence so easy; today we find fatally easy the assumption of guilt. — Carolyn Heilbrun

A revolutionary marriage ... [is] one in which both partners have work at the center of their lives and must find a delicate balance that can support both together and each individually. — Carolyn Heilbrun

Androgyny suggests a spirit of reconciliation between the sexes ... — Carolyn Heilbrun

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

Shifting problems is the first rule for a long and pleasant life. — Carolyn Heilbrun

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. — Carolyn Heilbrun

Thinking about profound social change, conservatives always expect disaster, while revolutionaries confidently anticipate utopia. Both are wrong. — 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

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. — Carolyn Heilbrun

Most full lives are filled with empty gestures. — Carolyn Heilbrun

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. — Carolyn Heilbrun

One sank into the ancient sin of anomie when challenges failed. — Carolyn Heilbrun

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. — Carolyn Heilbrun

New York is not like London, a now-and-then place to many people. You can either not live in New York or not live anyplace else. One is either a lover or hater. — Carolyn Heilbrun

Normal is absolutely my least favorite word. — Carolyn Heilbrun

The term 'androgyny' ... defines a condition under which the characteristics of the sexes, and the human impulses expressed by men and women, are not rigidly assigned. Androgyny seeks to liberate the individual from the confines of the appropriate. — Carolyn Heilbrun

Upon becoming fifty the one thing you can't afford is habit. — Carolyn Heilbrun

The compulsion to find a lover and husband in a single person has doomed more women to misery than any other illusion. — Carolyn Heilbrun

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. — Carolyn Heilbrun

What marks a writer is this: until she - or he, of course - writes down whatever happened, turns it into a story, it hasn't really happened, it hasn't shape, form, reality. — Carolyn Heilbrun

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

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. — Carolyn Heilbrun

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

Maturity ... is letting things happen. — Carolyn Heilbrun

It's hard to be happy, and safe, and applauded in a miserable world. — Carolyn Heilbrun

We cannot guess the outcome of our actions ... Which is why our actions must always be acceptable in themselves, and not as strategies. — Carolyn Heilbrun