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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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Carolyn Heilbrun
Taken
Eden
Real
Powerless
Nostalgia
World
Resentment
Easily
Hatred
Emotion
Dangerous
Glides

More quotes by 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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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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... success always worries academics, when it moves into the popular world.
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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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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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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Everyone likes to talk shop, which is the most interesting talk in the world, in the beginning.
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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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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Male friends do not always face each other they stand side by side, facing the world.
Carolyn Heilbrun
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Ideas move fast when their time comes.
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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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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. . . 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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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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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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You can flush my ashes down the toilet, for all I care.
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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Is there any vanity greater than the vanity of those who believe themselves without it?
Carolyn Heilbrun
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Professors of literature collect books the way a ship collects barnacles, without seeming effort.
Carolyn Heilbrun