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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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Carolyn Heilbrun
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More quotes by 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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You can flush my ashes down the toilet, for all I care.
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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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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. . . 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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One hires lawyers as on hires plumbers, because one wants to keep one's hands off the beastly drains.
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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Ideas move fast when their time comes.
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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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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Whether animals admit it or not, they and I communicate.
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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It's hard to be happy, and safe, and applauded in a miserable world.
Carolyn Heilbrun
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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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Power consists to a large extent in deciding what stories will be told.
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.
Carolyn Heilbrun
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... success always worries academics, when it moves into the popular world.
Carolyn Heilbrun
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We in middle age require adventure.
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