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.
Carolyn HeilbrunThe compulsion to find a lover and husband in a single person has doomed more women to misery than any other illusion.
Carolyn HeilbrunMale friends do not always face each other; they stand side by side, facing the world.
Carolyn HeilbrunWhat 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 HeilbrunQuoting, like smoking, ... is a dirty habit to which I am devoted. But then ... I am a professor of English literature; it is an occupational hazard.
Carolyn Heilbrunthe 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 HeilbrunOne hires lawyers as on hires plumbers, because one wants to keep one's hands off the beastly drains.
Carolyn HeilbrunArdent, 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 HeilbrunOne cannot make up stories; one can only retell in new ways the stories one has already heard.
Carolyn HeilbrunEveryone likes to talk shop, which is the most interesting talk in the world, in the beginning.
Carolyn HeilbrunThe married are those who have taken the terrible risk of intimacy and, having taken it, know life without intimacy to be impossible.
Carolyn HeilbrunOnly a marriage with partners strong enough to risk divorce is strong enough to avoid it.
Carolyn HeilbrunProfessors of literature collect books the way a ship collects barnacles, without seeming effort.
Carolyn HeilbrunWomen, 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]
Carolyn HeilbrunOdd, 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.
Carolyn HeilbrunOnce 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 HeilbrunWhether 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 HeilbrunWe cannot guess the outcome of our actions... Which is why our actions must always be acceptable in themselves, and not as strategies.
Carolyn HeilbrunIronically, women who acquire power are more likely to be criticized for it than are the men who have always had it.
Carolyn HeilbrunLife 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 HeilbrunThinking about profound social change, conservatives always expect disaster, while revolutionaries confidently anticipate utopia. Both are wrong.
Carolyn HeilbrunThe rare, delicate flavor of a life after retiring in one's sixties, whatever one has "retired" from, the pleasure I experienced beyond my job at Columbia, is a gift of life in the last decades. but it is not easily learned. . . . But sometimes, the only way to live is to get out, or at least seriously to contemplate getting out, doing the impossible,flinging the conventional tea.
Carolyn HeilbrunI 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 HeilbrunWhy 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 HeilbrunNew 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. . . a relationship has a momentum, it must change and develop, and will tend to move toward the point of greatest commitment.
Carolyn HeilbrunToday'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 HeilbrunThe 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 HeilbrunAndrogyny 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.
Carolyn Heilbrun