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

Carolyn Heilbrun

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Carolyn Heilbrun
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More quotes by Carolyn Heilbrun

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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.
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One cannot make up stories one can only retell in new ways the stories one has already heard.
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Male friends do not always face each other they stand side by side, facing the world.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Upon becoming fifty the one thing you can't afford is habit.
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Everyone likes to talk shop, which is the most interesting talk in the world, in the beginning.
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... success always worries academics, when it moves into the popular world.
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We in middle age require adventure.
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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.
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It's hard to be happy, and safe, and applauded in a miserable world.
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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.
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A dog is the only exercise machine you cannot decide to skip when you don't feel like it.
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Whether animals admit it or not, they and I communicate.
Carolyn Heilbrun
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The compulsion to find a lover and husband in a single person has doomed more women to misery than any other illusion.
Carolyn Heilbrun