Carolyn Heilbrun

Today's shocks are tomorrow's conventions.

As the years go on a sense of deep patience comes over one; one seems to know the virtue of ripeness, and the danger of rushing events.

Ideas move fast when their time comes.

Thinking about profound social change, conservatives always expect disaster, while revolutionaries confidently anticipate utopia. Both are wrong.

Ideas move rapidly when their time comes.

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.

Odd, the years it took to learn one simple fact: that the prize just ahead, the next job, publication, love affair, marriage always seemed to hold the key to satisfaction but never, in the longer run, sufficed.

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

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

You can flush my ashes down the toilet, for all I care.

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

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.

Quoting, like smoking, is a dirty habit to which I am devoted.

We in middle age require adventure.

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

The journey is over. Love to all.