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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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Carolyn Heilbrun
Impossible
Taken
Without
Life
Intimacy
Married
Marriage
Terrible
Risk

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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Androgyny 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
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Male friends do not always face each other they stand side by side, facing the world.
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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.
Carolyn Heilbrun
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We in middle age require adventure.
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
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Upon becoming fifty the one thing you can't afford is habit.
Carolyn Heilbrun
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You can flush my ashes down the toilet, for all I care.
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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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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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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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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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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. . . a relationship has a momentum, it must change and develop, and will tend to move toward the point of greatest commitment.
Carolyn Heilbrun
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Cynic' is the sentimentalist's name for the realist.
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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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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Shifting problems is the first rule for a long and pleasant life.
Carolyn Heilbrun
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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.
Carolyn Heilbrun
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That is the point of quotations. One can use another's words to be insulting.
Carolyn Heilbrun