Quote

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

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Carolyn Heilbrun
Seems
Deliberately
Firsts
Fallen
Rudderless
Self
Became
Fitful
First
Gold
Austere
Life
Doubt
Doubting
Whether
Accidentally
Half
Unconsciously
Woman
Composed

More quotes by Carolyn Heilbrun

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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
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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
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One cannot make up stories one can only retell in new ways the stories one has already heard.
Carolyn Heilbrun
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That is the point of quotations. One can use another's words to be insulting.
Carolyn Heilbrun
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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
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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.
Carolyn Heilbrun
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In former days, everyone found the assumption of innocence so easy today we find fatally easy the assumption of guilt.
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.
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.
Carolyn Heilbrun
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... success always worries academics, when it moves into the popular world.
Carolyn Heilbrun
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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 Heilbrun
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We in middle age require adventure.
Carolyn Heilbrun
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Shifting problems is the first rule for a long and pleasant life.
Carolyn Heilbrun
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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.
Carolyn Heilbrun
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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.
Carolyn Heilbrun
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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.
Carolyn Heilbrun
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Cynic' is the sentimentalist's name for the realist.
Carolyn Heilbrun
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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
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Professors of literature collect books the way a ship collects barnacles, without seeming effort.
Carolyn Heilbrun
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A dog is the only exercise machine you cannot decide to skip when you don't feel like it.
Carolyn Heilbrun