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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
Without
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More quotes by 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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Power consists to a large extent in deciding what stories will be told.
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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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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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
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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
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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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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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Male friends do not always face each other they stand side by side, facing the world.
Carolyn Heilbrun
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Everyone likes to talk shop, which is the most interesting talk in the world, in the beginning.
Carolyn Heilbrun
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We in middle age require adventure.
Carolyn Heilbrun
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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
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Whether animals admit it or not, they and I communicate.
Carolyn Heilbrun
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The journey is over. Love to all.
Carolyn Heilbrun