Quote

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

Carolyn Heilbrun

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Carolyn Heilbrun
Ships
Effort
Books
Barnacles
Literature
Collects
Book
Seeming
Without
Collect
Way
Professors
Ship

More quotes by Carolyn Heilbrun

Image
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.
Carolyn Heilbrun
Image
. . . a relationship has a momentum, it must change and develop, and will tend to move toward the point of greatest commitment.
Carolyn Heilbrun
Image
Whether animals admit it or not, they and I communicate.
Carolyn Heilbrun
Image
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
Image
... success always worries academics, when it moves into the popular world.
Carolyn Heilbrun
Image
The married are those who have taken the terrible risk of intimacy and, having taken it, know life without intimacy to be impossible.
Carolyn Heilbrun
Image
The compulsion to find a lover and husband in a single person has doomed more women to misery than any other illusion.
Carolyn Heilbrun
Image
It's hard to be happy, and safe, and applauded in a miserable world.
Carolyn Heilbrun
Image
Is there any vanity greater than the vanity of those who believe themselves without it?
Carolyn Heilbrun
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
A dog is the only exercise machine you cannot decide to skip when you don't feel like it.
Carolyn Heilbrun
Image
Everyone likes to talk shop, which is the most interesting talk in the world, in the beginning.
Carolyn Heilbrun
Image
Ideas move fast when their time comes.
Carolyn Heilbrun
Image
You can flush my ashes down the toilet, for all I care.
Carolyn Heilbrun
Image
One cannot make up stories one can only retell in new ways the stories one has already heard.
Carolyn Heilbrun
Image
Quoting, 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 Heilbrun
Image
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
Image
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