Carolyn Heilbrun Quotes

Ideas move fast when their time comes.

The married are those who have taken the terrible risk of intimacy and, having taken it, know life without intimacy to be impossible.

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.

Ironically, women who acquire power are more likely to be criticized for it than are the men who have always had it.

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.

Quoting, like smoking, is a dirty habit to which I am devoted.

Thinking about profound social change, conservatives always expect disaster, while revolutionaries confidently anticipate utopia. Both are wrong.

We in middle age require adventure.

Women, I believe, search for fellow beings who have faced similar struggles, conveyed them in ways a reader can transform into her own life, confirmed desires the reader had hardly acknowledge-desires that now seem possible. Women catch courage from the women whose lives and writings they read, and women call the bearer of that courage friend. [p. 138]

Whether animals admit it or not, they and I communicate,