Top 40 Carolyn G. Heilbrun Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “In former days, everyone found the assumption of innocence so easy; today we find fatally easy the assumption of guilt.”

— Carolyn G. Heilbrun

2. “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 G. Heilbrun

3. “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 G. Heilbrun

4. “Most full lives are filled with empty gestures.”

— Carolyn G. Heilbrun

5. “Power consists to a large extent in deciding what stories will be told.”

— Carolyn G. Heilbrun

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

6. “Androgyny suggests a spirit of reconciliation between the sexes...”

— Carolyn G. Heilbrun

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

— Carolyn G. Heilbrun

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

— Carolyn G. Heilbrun

9. “The journey is over. Love to all.”

— Carolyn G. Heilbrun

10. “Male friends do not always face each other; they stand side by side, facing the world.”

— Carolyn G. Heilbrun

11. “You can flush my ashes down the toilet, for all I care.”

— Carolyn G. Heilbrun

12. “Normal is absolutely my least favorite word.”

— Carolyn G. Heilbrun

13. “Professors of literature collect books the way a ship collects barnacles, without seeming effort.”

— Carolyn G. Heilbrun

14. “A dog is the only exercise machine you cannot decide to skip when you don’t feel like it.”

— Carolyn G. Heilbrun

15. “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.”

— Carolyn G. Heilbrun

16. “New York is not like London, a now-and-then place to many people. You can either not live in New York or not live anyplace else. One is either a lover or hater.”

— Carolyn G. Heilbrun

17. “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 G. Heilbrun

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

18. “Shifting problems is the first rule for a long and pleasant life.”

— Carolyn G. Heilbrun

19. “Today’s shocks are tomorrow’s conventions.”

— Carolyn G. Heilbrun

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

— Carolyn G. Heilbrun

21. “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 G. Heilbrun

22. “A literary academic can no more pass a bookstore than an alcoholic can pass a bar.”

— Carolyn G. Heilbrun

23. “One cannot make up stories; one can only retell in new ways the stories one has already heard.”

— Carolyn G. Heilbrun

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

24. “Only a marriage with partners strong enough to risk divorce is strong enough to avoid it.”

— Carolyn G. Heilbrun

Featured in: Strong Quotes

25. “We women have lived too much with closure: “If he notices me, if I marry him, if I get into college, if I get this work accepted, if I get this job” – there always seems to loom the possibility of something being over, settled, sweeping clear the way for contentment. This is the delusion of a passive life. When the hope for closure is abandoned, when there is an end to fantasy, adventure for women will begin.”

— Carolyn G. Heilbrun

26. “Everyone likes to talk shop, which is the most interesting talk in the world, in the beginning.”

— Carolyn G. Heilbrun

27. “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 G. Heilbrun

28. “Ideas move fast when their time comes.”

— Carolyn G. Heilbrun

29. “The compulsion to find a lover and husband in a single person has doomed more women to misery than any other illusion.”

— Carolyn G. Heilbrun

30. “Why do long marriages occasionally endow their inhabitants with a rare kind of equilibrium otherwise almost unknown in human relations? My guess is that the value of the moment has at last overshadowed the long history of resentments, betrayals, and boredom.”

— Carolyn G. Heilbrun

31. “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 G. Heilbrun

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

— Carolyn G. Heilbrun

33. “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 G. Heilbrun

34. “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 G. Heilbrun

35. “Is there any vanity greater than the vanity of those who believe themselves without it?”

— Carolyn G. Heilbrun

36. “That is the point of quotations. One can use another’s words to be insulting.”

— Carolyn G. Heilbrun

37. “Odd, the years it took to learn one simple fact: that the prize just ahead, the next job, publication, love affair, marriage always seemed to hold the key to satisfaction but never, in the longer run, sufficed.”

— Carolyn G. Heilbrun

38. “With solitude, however, fervently it is desired and embraced, comes loneliness. T. H White, the author, offered advice to those in sadness – learn something new.”

— Carolyn G. Heilbrun

39. “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 G. Heilbrun

40. “Unfortunately, power is something that women abjure once they perceive the great difference between the lives possible to men and to women...”

— Carolyn G. Heilbrun

41. “One hires lawyers as on hires plumbers, because one wants to keep one’s hands off the beastly drains.”

— Carolyn G. Heilbrun

42. “We in middle age require adventure.”

— Carolyn G. Heilbrun

43. “Upon becoming fifty the one thing you can’t afford is habit.”

— Carolyn G. Heilbrun

44. “It’s hard to be happy, and safe, and applauded in a miserable world.”

— Carolyn G. Heilbrun

45. “To continue what one had been doing – which was Dante’s idea of hell – is, I came to see, and the vision frightened me, easy in one’s sixties.”

— Carolyn G. Heilbrun

46. “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 G. Heilbrun

47. “Many of us feel alone and assaulted by the meaninglessness of what we are doing. But, at such times, we are doing; the problem is not a lack of activity with a point, but rather questions about the point of the activity.”

— Carolyn G. Heilbrun