Quotes from Carolyn G. Heilbrun

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

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

whether we feel admiring of our parents, reconciled to them, or still estranged, still teetering near a cliff of anger, we recognize that we can never meet them in agreement about what we have encountered beyond their experience.

Is this true? Those who had world' enough, that is, those engaged in a demanding daily vocation, were short of time while those without regular obligations had more than sufficient time, but no world?

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.

My casual talk with my adult children brings with it another fleeting sadness: They are the age I was when it became, because of profound political differences, difficult for me to chat easily with my parents: vituperation always lurked. They and I later reconciled but those years of loss now add a special poignancy.

The impression I have, therefore, of marriage in my sixties is of a time when I took to living only for the moment -- when, above all, I took to expecting nothing that long years of close association had by now, at long last, assured me would never occur. He would not change his personality or his habits of loving, and neither would I. [pp. 213-214].

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.

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

Ideas move fast when their time comes.

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.

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.

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.