Carolyn Heilbrun Quotes

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

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.

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

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.

We in middle age require adventure.

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

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.

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.

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

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