Thinking about profound social change, conservatives always expect disaster, while revolutionaries confidently anticipate utopia. Both are wrong. Carolyn Heilbrun More Quotes by Carolyn Heilbrun More Quotes From Carolyn Heilbrun A literary academic can no more pass a bookstore than an alcoholic can pass a bar. Carolyn Heilbrun humorousinspirationalbook Ideas move fast when their time comes. Carolyn Heilbrun womenideasmoving 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 Heilbrun revengeleadershipsweet Power consists to a large extent in deciding what stories will be told. Carolyn Heilbrun stories 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 Heilbrun essentialsmatteraction Ironically, women who acquire power are more likely to be criticized for it than are the men who have always had it. Carolyn Heilbrun sisterhoodpowermen We in middle age require adventure. Carolyn Heilbrun ageadventuretravel 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 marriageplayerlaw 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 Heilbrun betrayalmarriagelong 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 marriagerisktaken 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 narrativedestinylong 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. Carolyn Heilbrun delicate-lifeteajobs Normal is absolutely my least favorite word. Carolyn Heilbrun favorite-wordsnormalserious 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 Heilbrun collegeadventurejobs 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 Heilbrun understandingracemen the term 'androgyny' ... defines a condition under which the characteristics of the sexes, and the human impulses expressed by men and women, are not rigidly assigned. Androgyny seeks to liberate the individual from the confines of the appropriate. Carolyn Heilbrun individualmensex 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 selfishkindnessyears One hires lawyers as on hires plumbers, because one wants to keep one's hands off the beastly drains. Carolyn Heilbrun lawwanthands 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 rangespiritsex Most full lives are filled with empty gestures. Carolyn Heilbrun gesturesemptyfilled
