54 Quotes by Carolyn G. Heilbrun

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.

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.

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.

My casual talk with my adult children brings with it another fleeting sadness: They are the age I was when it became, because of profound political differences, difficult for me to chat easily with my parents: vituperation always lurked. They and I later reconciled but those years of loss now add a special poignancy.

... 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.

Is this true? Those who had "world' enough, that is, those engaged in a demanding daily vocation, were short of time while those without regular obligations had more than sufficient time, but no world?

Unfortunately, power is something that women abjure once they perceive the great difference between the lives possible to men and to women...

It may be that this is one reason the young do not want to hear about our past, about how it was when we were their age. They may sense that one day they too will cease to live completely in the present that surrounds them, not because they remember their past or pay it much attention, but because inevitably their children, or the young people they know, will assign them, as they will assign themselves, to a different, largely abandoned world. [p. 189]

The impression I have, therefore, of marriage in my sixties is of a time when I took to living only for the moment -- when, above all, I took to expecting nothing that long years of close association had by now, at long last, assured me would never occur. He would not change his personality or his habits of loving, and neither would I. [pp. 213-214].