Carolyn Gold Heilbrun

“The woman who has not learned to say 'no' to things she does not want to do, who does not know how to go about listening to her own needs, is in deep trouble.”

“To have been a woman, a feminist, and a writer is to have been in a constant state of rage.”

“We may be able to retell our stories, if we are willing to be courageous enough to see our lives from the outside.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Women have been deprived of the narratives, or the texts, plots, or examples, by which they might assume power over their own lives.”

“I do not believe that we have read the accounts of the lives of many women, and that is why we do not know how to live our own.”

“Anger is an appropriate reaction to racist attitudes, as is fury to sexist attitudes.”

“The aging woman is a modern invention.”

“Biography is a fiction, a construction, and a very subjective one at that.”

“It has been women's task throughout history to go on believing in life when there was almost no hope.”

“We women are all quietly mad.”

“Perhaps the saddest and most telling detail of all is that it is the women who have achieved some prominence in the world who are the most likely to be childless.”