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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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Carolyn Heilbrun
Believe
Vanity
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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.
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Everyone likes to talk shop, which is the most interesting talk in the world, in the beginning.
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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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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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Whether animals admit it or not, they and I communicate.
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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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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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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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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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That is the point of quotations. One can use another's words to be insulting.
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.
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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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... success always worries academics, when it moves into the popular world.
Carolyn Heilbrun
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Shifting problems is the first rule for a long and pleasant life.
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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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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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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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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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