Quotes by Carolyn Heilbrun
“We live our lives through texts. They may be read, or chanted, or experienced electronically, or come to us, like the murmurings of our mothers, telling us what conventions demand.”— Carolyn Heilbrun
“What matters is that lives do not serve as models; only stories do that. And it is a hard thing to make up stories to live by.”— Carolyn Heilbrun
“It has been suggested that hanging in the background of the lives of women is a single question: 'How can I be a good girl and a true woman at the same time?'”— Carolyn Heilbrun
“Women have been deprived of the narratives, or the texts, plots, or examples, by which they might assume power over—take control of—their own lives.”— Carolyn Heilbrun
“To have grown up female is to have been trained to be a stranger to our own power.”— Carolyn Heilbrun
“There are four ways, and only four ways, in which we have contact with the world. We are evaluated and classified by these four contacts: what we do, how we look, what we say, and how we say it.”— Carolyn Heilbrun
“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.”— Carolyn Heilbrun
“The age of a woman doesn't mean a thing. The best tunes are played on the oldest fiddles.”— Carolyn Heilbrun
“We can only live the life we can imagine. And we can imagine only what we know.”— Carolyn Heilbrun