Carolyn Heilbrun Quotations

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Whether animals admit it or not, they and I communicate,

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.

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.

Upon becoming fifty the one thing you can't afford is habit.