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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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Carolyn Heilbrun
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More quotes by Carolyn Heilbrun

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Upon becoming fifty the one thing you can't afford is habit.
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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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Power consists to a large extent in deciding what stories will be told.
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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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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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The married are those who have taken the terrible risk of intimacy and, having taken it, know life without intimacy to be impossible.
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Male friends do not always face each other they stand side by side, facing the world.
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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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It's hard to be happy, and safe, and applauded in a miserable world.
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In former days, everyone found the assumption of innocence so easy today we find fatally easy the assumption of guilt.
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Is there any vanity greater than the vanity of those who believe themselves without it?
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Ideas move fast when their time comes.
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Cynic' is the sentimentalist's name for the realist.
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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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One hires lawyers as on hires plumbers, because one wants to keep one's hands off the beastly drains.
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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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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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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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The journey is over. Love to all.
Carolyn Heilbrun
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You can flush my ashes down the toilet, for all I care.
Carolyn Heilbrun