Carolyn G. Heilbrun Quotes

All good marriages are remarriages.

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.

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

As we age, many of us who are privileged . . . those with some assured place and pattern in their lives, with some financial security---are in danger of choosing to stay right where we are, to undertake each day's routine, and to listen to our arteries hardening. . . . Instead, we should make use of our security, our seniority, to take risks, to make noise, to be courageous, to become unpopular.

The antithetical or perhaps mirror image to sadness is the experience, similarly unique to one's late years, of a swift, mysterious wave of happiness, also causeless, but of much shorter duration. I cannot remember a time, before my sixties, when the consciousness of happiness would sweep over me and, like a shower of cold water when one is desperately overheated, offer me a passing sensation very close to glee.
Both sadness and fleeting happiness relate, I think, to mortality, to the consciousness of being old and of nearing the end of life ... these sensations ... surge up from the unconscious, to be a gift of long life or fortunate old age. Both sadness and happiness, but sadness more, are related to the fact that nothing of all this will endure for long. [p. 179]

... 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.

Sadness such as mine is not depression; it can be blown away by an interesting conversation, a welcome telephone call, or a compelling idea for an essay or piece of fiction. It returns without evident cause, however obvious the cause of its banishment, and it belongs, I have come to suspect, to both youth and age, less frequently to the years between.[pp.177-178]

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.

Ours is a long marriage, and we have found solitude together. [p. 23]

The less androgynous the person, the likelier he or she was to be incapable of action if the appropriate action was not clearly delineated ... How many women there were ... who tore themselves or their families apart because they could not allow themselves any action or occupation that could appear manly, and might make their husbands appear less so. [pp. 132-133]

It is noteworthy that few works of fiction make marriage their central concern. As Northrup Frye puts it, with his accustomed clarity: 'The heroine who becomes a bride, and eventually, one assumes, a mother, on the last page of a romance, has accommodated herself to the cyclical movement: by her marriage ... she completes the cycle and passes out of the story. We are usually given to understand that a happy and well-adjusted sexual life does not concern us as readers.' Fiction has largely rejected marriage as a subject, except in those instances where it is presented as a history of betrayal
at worst an Updike hell, at best when Auden speaks of it as a game calling for 'patience, foresight, maneuver, like war, like marriage.' Marriage is very different than fiction presents it as being. We rarely examine its unromantic aspects.

Today women live long into their children's adult lives ... too little is made of the pleasure we women feel in conversing with our grown children, and in allowing ourselves, from time to time, to think of them as friends. I have been fortunate in having children with whom conversation is possible; the sheerest pleasure here, for me, has been in meeting with them each alone ... [p. 185]

But will anyone again look at that tree, read that poem, love a dog in quite my way? I am a particular and, despite the commonness of all people, a unique person in the way I perceive and think and appreciate, and I am sad that this particularity shall before too long be gone. This is not arrogance; it is the simple truth, known to anyone who has loved a person dead in the fullness of her life: what we miss is the particularity, that unique voice. [pp. 184-185]

Men are not listeners ... They hear what they expect to hear, or want to hear, or are certain they will hear, and women, being supple creatures trained to please, have often told them what we women knew would satisfy them. [p. 167]

I have spoken of reinventing marriage, of marriages achieving their rebirth in the middle age of the partners. This phenomenon has been called the 'comedy of remarriage' by Stanley Cavell, whose Pursuits of Happiness, a film book, is perhaps the best marriage manual ever published. One must, however, translate his formulation from the language of Hollywood, in which he developed it, into the language of middle age: less glamour, less supple youth, less fantasyland. Cavell writes specifically of Hollywood movies of the 1930s and 1940s in which couples -- one partner is often the dazzling Cary Grant -- learn to value each other, to educate themselves in equality, to remarry. Cavell recognizes that the actresses in these movie -- often the dazzling Katherine Hepburn -- are what made them possible. If read not as an account of beautiful people in hilarious situations, but as a deeply philosophical discussion of marriage, his book contains what are almost aphorisms of marital achievement. For example: ....'[The romance of remarriage] poses a structure in which we are permanently in doubt who the hero is, that is, whether it is the male or female who is the active partner, which of them is in quest, who is following whom.'

Cary grant & Katherine Hepburn "Above all, despite the sexual attractiveness of the actors in the movies he discusses, Cavell knows that sexuality is not the ultimate secret in these marriage: 'in God's intention a meet and happy conversation is th

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.

If an animal is designed by nature to have claws it ought to keep them, and if men come with quirks that they are incapable of changing, well, a certain amount of quietude and even peace can be achieved by just realizing that it's all inherent in the beast. [p. 173]

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.

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

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.

The most potent reward for parenthood I have known has been delight in my fully grown progeny. They are friends with an extra dimension of affection. True, there is also an extra dimension of resentment on the children's part, but once offspring are in their thirties, their ability to love their parents, perhaps in contemplation of the deaths to come, expands, and, if one is fortunate, grudges recede. []p. 209]

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.