CAROLYN GOLD HEILBRUN

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.

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

We in middle age require adventure.

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

The journey is over. Love to all.

Today's shocks are tomorrow's conventions.

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 point of quotations is that one can use another's words to be insulting.

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.

Romance is the glamour which turns the dust of everyday life into a golden haze.

Ideas move fast when their time comes.

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.

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

... success always worries academics, when it moves into the popular world.

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.

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

I don't know why togetherness was ever held up as an ideal of marriage. Away from home for both, then together, that's much better.

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.

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.

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.

Everyone likes to talk shop, which is the most interesting talk in the world, in the beginning.

One cannot make up stories; one can only retell in new ways the stories one has already heard.

Androgyny suggests a spirit of reconciliation between the sexes.