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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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Professors of literature collect books the way a ship collects barnacles, without seeming effort.
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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. . . 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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Everyone likes to talk shop, which is the most interesting talk in the world, in the beginning.
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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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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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.
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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Cynic' is the sentimentalist's name for the realist.
Carolyn Heilbrun
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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.
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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We in middle age require adventure.
Carolyn Heilbrun
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Whether animals admit it or not, they and I communicate.
Carolyn Heilbrun
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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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A dog is the only exercise machine you cannot decide to skip when you don't feel like it.
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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The journey is over. Love to all.
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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I don't know why togetherness was ever held up as an ideal of marriage. Away from home for both, then together, that's much better.
Carolyn Heilbrun
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... success always worries academics, when it moves into the popular world.
Carolyn Heilbrun