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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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Carolyn Heilbrun
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Upon becoming fifty the one thing you can't afford is habit.
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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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Shifting problems is the first rule for a long and pleasant life.
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The journey is over. Love to all.
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Power consists to a large extent in deciding what stories will be told.
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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.
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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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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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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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It's hard to be happy, and safe, and applauded in a miserable world.
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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.
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Cynic' is the sentimentalist's name for the realist.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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Professors of literature collect books the way a ship collects barnacles, without seeming effort.
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One cannot make up stories one can only retell in new ways the stories one has already heard.
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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.
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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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