Quotes by Carolyn Heilbrun

As E.M. Forster so brilliantly put it, 'It is difficult, after accepting six cups of tea, to throw the seventh in the face of your hostess.' Sometimes the only way to live is to get out, or at least seriously contemplate getting out, doing the impossible, flinging the conventional tea.

I was born a feminist and never wavered from that position. I do not mean, of course, that I expressed feminist views in the dreary masculinist years after World War II. But I never denied the pain to myself, or lied about my anger.

Ideas move rapidly when their time comes.

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 Freudian view that accomplished women are sexually men, or trying to be, has done more, I suspect, than any other misconception to doom women to fear of accomplishment and selfhood.

The journey is over. Love to all.

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.

Women, I believe, search for fellow beings who have faced similar struggles, conveyed them in ways a reader can transform into her own life, confirmed desires the reader had hardly acknowledged - desires that now seem possible. Women catch courage from the women whose lives and writings they read, and women call the bearer of that courage friend.

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.