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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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More quotes by 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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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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Male friends do not always face each other they stand side by side, facing the world.
Carolyn Heilbrun
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The journey is over. Love to all.
Carolyn Heilbrun
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Quoting, like smoking, is a dirty habit to which I am devoted.
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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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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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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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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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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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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... success always worries academics, when it moves into the popular world.
Carolyn Heilbrun
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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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Is there any vanity greater than the vanity of those who believe themselves without it?
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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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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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 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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Cynic' is the sentimentalist's name for the realist.
Carolyn Heilbrun