Quotes from Carolyn Heilbrun

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.

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

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.

. . . a relationship has a momentum, it must change and develop, and will tend to move toward the point of greatest commitment.

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.

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

It's hard to be happy, and safe, and applauded in a miserable world.

The journey is over. Love to all.

One hires lawyers as on hires plumbers, because one wants to keep one's hands off the beastly drains.

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

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

the most potent reward for parenthood I have known has been delight in my fully grown progeny. They are friends with an extra dimension of affection. True, there is also an extra dimension of resentment on the children's part, but once offspring are in their thirties, their ability to love their parents, perhaps in contemplation of the deaths to come, expands, and, if one is fortunate, grudges recede. []p. 209]

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.

Today women live long into their children's adult lives . . . too little is made of the pleasure we women feel in conversing with our grown children, and in allowing ourselves, from time to time, to think of them as friends. I have been fortunate in having children with whom conversation is possible; the sheerest pleasure here, for me, has been in meeting with them each alone . . . [p. 185]

All good marriages are remarriages.

Ours is a long marriage, and we have found solitude together. [p. 23]

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.

But will anyone again look at that tree, read that poem, love a dog in quite my way? I am a particular and, despite the commonness of all people, a unique person in the way I perceive and think and appreciate, and I am sad that this particularity shall before too long be gone. This is not arrogance; it is the simple truth, known to anyone who has loved a person dead in the fullness of her life: what we miss is the particularity, that unique voice. [pp. 184-185]

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

What one remembers is, I think, a clue to what one wants to be.

As we age, many of us who are privileged . . . those with some assured place and pattern in their lives, with some financial security---are in danger of choosing to stay right where we are, to undertake each day's routine, and to listen to our arteries hardening. . . . Instead, we should make use of our security, our seniority, to take risks, to make noise, to be courageous, to become unpopular.

the less androgynous the person, the likelier he or she was to be incapable of action if the appropriate action was not clearly delineated . . . How many women there were . . . who tore themselves or their families apart because they could not allow themselves any action or occupation that could appear manly, and might make their husbands appear less so. [pp. 132-133]

If an animal is designed by nature to have claws it ought to keep them, and if men come with quirks that they are incapable of changing, well, a certain amount of quietude and even peace can be achieved by just realizing that it's all inherent in the beast. [p. 173]

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