Carolyn Heilbrun Quotes

Carolyn Heilbrun delivers sharp, rhetorical quips about language and change that feel like a clever verbal spar.

14 quotes

  1. Today's shocks are tomorrow's conventions.

  2. The point of quotations is that one can use another's words to be insulting.

    #2 Attribution disputed; shown as originally published.

  3. We cannot guess the outcome of our actions... Which is why our actions must always be acceptable in themselves, and not as strategies.

  4. 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.

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

  6. maturity ... is letting things happen.

  7. one sank into the ancient sin of anomie when challenges failed.

  8. 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.

  9. 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.

  10. That is the point of quotations. One can use another's words to be insulting.

  11. a revolutionary marriage ... [is] one in which both partners have work at the center of their lives and must find a delicate balance that can support both together and each individually.

  12. The rare, delicate flavor of a life after retiring in one's sixties, whatever one has "retired" from, the pleasure I experienced beyond my job at Columbia, is a gift of life in the last decades. but it is not easily learned. . . . But sometimes, the only way to live is to get out, or at least seriously to contemplate getting out, doing the impossible,flinging the conventional tea.

  13. 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.

  14. 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.