Sheila Heti Quotes & Sayings

I spend most of my time in my head. You can always work out solutions and satisfactions there. Maybe you can't actually bring them about, but there's usually a pleasant pillow of time between imagining you can, and realizing you cannot. — Sheila Heti

In their quest for a life without failure, suffering, or doubt, that is what they achieve: a life empty of all those things that make a human life meaningful. — Sheila Heti

Life is not a harvest. Just because you have an apple doesn't mean you have an orchard. You have an apple. Put a fence around it. Once you have put a fence around everything you value, then you have the total circle of your heart. — Sheila Heti

I'm in a serious monogamous relationship, and I don't want to keep having different boyfriends, and I have this instead - with men and women. It's better. Instead of having sex, we have art. — Sheila Heti

Somehow I had turned myself into the worst thing in the world: I was just another man who wanted to teach me something! — Sheila Heti

Sometimes you do have people who are great at curating; sometimes you have people curating who don't know what they're do ... — Sheila Heti

A problem I've always had with fashion magazines is that women are encouraged to copy other women. While I suspect that many men enjoy copying other men (consider the idea of the alpha male and beta males), and while part of what makes a man "superior" is how close he can get to "embodying manliness — Sheila Heti

It has long been known to me that certain objects want you as much as you want them. These are the ones that become important, the objects that you hold dear. The others fade from your life entirely. You wanted them, but they did not want you in return. — Sheila Heti

There's so much writing I could have done and so many ideas that I had and so many things I wanted to work on that I didn't. I like too much having things in my head rather than doing the work. — Sheila Heti

That was it. She came out of it. She never had such a down as that or such an up as the three days that preceded it, not ever again in her life. The rest of her life was like a long thin line with little diminuendos and tiny little crescendos, and friends visiting from out of town. — Sheila Heti

I am obsessed with shopping for secondhand clothing. Nobody else has it, and it has a story that comes with it. — Sheila Heti

I felt like I was the tin man, the lion, and the scarecrow in one: I could not feel my heart, I had no courage, I could not use my brain, — Sheila Heti

It's so hard to live that one needs a support around life. We can't live without some supernatural support. — Sheila Heti

When we are all in a culture together, we share a secret with each other, and this is true of every civilization down through time. Not even their art, not even their laws, their artifacts, their literature, their philosophies, their wars, their stone bowls can ever reveal that civilization's secret. Even today, with all we've built that will outlast us, we will not leave behind the secret that binds us. In this way, we are like any family at the core of which there is a secret that, even if someone asked, one one in that family
not even the snitchy, untrustworthy types
could ever reveal. In this way, we are all like a family together in the present, and no future civilization will every know our secret - the secret of our existence together
just as we do not know the secrets that have lived and died with the past. — Sheila Heti

But two years into our parties, I surveyed the scene from the corner and wondered, Why are we having these parties? What were we making, coming together like that? We were trying to prove that we had everything because we had parties, but I began to feel like we had nothing but parties. If anyone from the future could look back on what we were building, I was sure they would say, That could only have been built by slaves. — Sheila Heti

We had always talked easily and well, and as we carried our drinks away, I asked him what he thought there was in us that forced us to tell stories to ourselves about our own lives - to make up stories that had such an arbitrary resemblance to our actual living. Why did we pick certain dots and connect them and not others? Why did we find it so irresistible to make ourselves into tragic figures with tragic flaws which were responsible for our pain? Maybe unfortunate things just happened; maybe there was just bad luck. Why did it seem like our greatest failures were caused by perversions in our souls?

'Perhaps it's evolutionary,' he said. ' If we saw ourselves in realistic proportions - how tiny we are, and how little ability we have to avoid the suffering that's an inevitable part of life - maybe we would be too discouraged to survive.'

'Or maybe,' I said, 'the truth is so diffuse that our minds cannot even hold on to it. — Sheila Heti

We tried not to smile, for smiling only encourages men to bore you and waste your time. — Sheila Heti

Writing fiction is a good way to inhabit other minds, if not other lives. — Sheila Heti

All I'm saying is: if there's a pool and people are in the pool and you're not in the pool, you want to be in the pool just like those people in the pool. It's just a fact of nature. — Sheila Heti

It's nice to go into your doom. It's so liberating. — Sheila Heti

There are certain people who do not feel like they were raised by wolves, and they are the ones who make the world tick. They are the ones who keep everything functioning so the rest of us can worry about what sort of person we should be. — Sheila Heti

If now in some ways I drink too much, it's not that I lack a reverence for the world. — Sheila Heti

I always had a fantasy of meeting a girl who was as serious as I was. — Sheila Heti

Boundaries, Sheila. Barriers. We need them. They let you love someone. Otherwise you might kill them. — Sheila Heti

To go on and on about your soul is to miss the whole point of life. I could say that with more certainty if I knew the whole point of life. — Sheila Heti

When I was in high school, and even to a degree while I was in university, I wasn't on the Internet. So it's not as embedded in my soul, that kind of way of being. — Sheila Heti

There are people whose learning is so great, they seem to inhabit a different realm of species-hood entirely. Somehow, they appear untroubled by the nullness. They are filled up with history and legends and beautiful poetry and all the gestures of all the great people down through time. When they talk, they are carried on a sea of their own belonging. It is like they were born to be fathers to us all. — Sheila Heti

Now I was tired. All I wanted was to rest. The six days of Creation each have their own morning and evening, thereby showing their beginning and end. Only the seventh day has neither morning nor evening. It stands outside of Creation , belonging to the divine order alone. I wanted a day without morning or evening. I wanted a day of rest. — Sheila Heti

There's so much beauty in this world that it's hard to begin. There are no words with which to express my gratitude at having been given this one chance to live - if not Live. Let other people frequent the nightclubs in their tight-ass skirts and Live. I'm just sitting here, vibrating in my apartment, at having been given this one chance to live. — Sheila Heti

I think a lot of people try to edit themselves out and I think that's a big mistake, because the person being interviewed is responding to a person, and if you don't know who that person is then you don't really know what's going on with the person being interviewed. — Sheila Heti

I kind of try to resist working a lot. I'm not a very disciplined worker. — Sheila Heti

It's fun to give pleasure to people. — Sheila Heti

I died. When a person is a chicken who crosses the road to get to the other side, and that is how she dies, then her life is a joke. Well, that is how I died - as a chicken crossing the road to get to the other side.

When I crossed the road that day, it was to the other side I was heading - that was how much despair I felt, our fight still in my mind. Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side. A suicide. The other side is death. Everyone knows that, right? — Sheila Heti

I've always had individual friends, but I didn't find the people I wanted to learn from as an adult until my midtwenties. — Sheila Heti

Better to have your failure right in front of you than the fantasy in your head. — Sheila Heti

Most people live their entire lives with their clothes on, and even if they wanted to, couldn't take them off. Then there are those who cannot put them on. They are the ones who live their lives not just as people but as examples of people. They are destined to expose every part of themselves, so the rest of us can know what it means to be a human.
Most people lead their private lives. They have been given a natural modesty that feels to them like morality, but it's not
it's luck. They shake their heads at the people with their clothes off rather than learning about human life from their example, but they are wrong to act so superior. Some of us have to be naked, so the rest can be exempted by fate. — Sheila Heti

There are times when things are clear in your head and your heart and everything comes all aligned and it's easy and it just feels good to do something. But most of the time it's not like that. Most of the time there's conflict between your head and your heart. — Sheila Heti

Aside from blow jobs, though, I'm through with being the perfect girlfriend, just through with it. Then if he's sore with me, let him dump my ass. That will just give me more time to be a genius. — Sheila Heti

Maybe that's good to not feel like you have to keep up when there's so much to keep up with right now. It's bottomless. — Sheila Heti

In the transcribing and the editing, you want some retention of how the person speaks - you don't want to edit out all of the hesitations and idiosyncrasies. And to get people to say something they've never said before. That's big. — Sheila Heti

I hadn't realized until this week that in [Moses'] youth he killed a man, an Egyptian, and buried him under some sandI used to worry that I wasn't enough like Jesus, but yesterday I remembered who was my king; a man who, when God addressed him and told him to lead the people out of Egypt, said, 'But I'm not a good talker! Couldn't you ask my brother instead?' So it should not be so hard to come at this life with a bit of honesty. I don't need to be great like the leader of the Christian people. I can be a bumbling, murderous coward like the King of the Jews. — Sheila Heti

You have to know where the funny is, and if you know where the funny is, you know everything. — Sheila Heti

Perhaps our vision of how life should be is actually no fun at all, and neglects to include the exciting people we have yet to meet, who make the stupid ways life seems to happen, happy after all. — Sheila Heti

There was not an awareness of pop culture in the household. There was a lot of respect for working hard, and for intellectual and professional achievement. — Sheila Heti

It is their everlasting switching that is the dangerous thing, not what they choose — Sheila Heti

Also, I knew that if I said a single word, I would burst into tears, as I always did, always had, my entire life, whenever anything difficult had to be discussed. It always was too scary; a threat I had felt since childhood that at any moment a relationship might disappear with a poof because of something little I had done or said. — Sheila Heti

He's just another man who wants to teach me something. — Sheila Heti

We don't know the effects we have on each other, but we have them. — Sheila Heti

I do feel it. And I've felt it my whole life, that the supernatural has a role in the world. — Sheila Heti

Women's fiction doesn't sound like anything but a slur to my ears. — Sheila Heti

I studied art history and philosophy and took economics and political science classes. I just took whatever I wanted and I didn't worry about grades and I read and learned a lot, and I didn't have much of a social life, so it was deeply absorbing. — Sheila Heti

I know that character exists from the outside alone. I know that inside the body there's just temperature. — Sheila Heti

I feel like one can have all of that as a writer; you're writing, you're reading, you're talking to interesting and intelligent people. Your life is structured around whatever book you're writing, and so is your reading and so are many of your conversations. — Sheila Heti

Literature and art are one of a number of relationships I have with the world. Like you have relationships with your friends and a relationship with your lover and your relationship with your family and your relationship with your work - sometimes it's really great; sometimes it's non-existent, sometimes it's fruitful. — Sheila Heti

One good thing about being a woman is we haven't too many examples yet of what a genius looks like. It could be me. — Sheila Heti

My parents are both scientists, and I was raised without god. — Sheila Heti

I like the jellyfish because it has no brain or heart. It's just a thing that takes in the ocean through its mouth. I like that kind of ambition and simplicity. — Sheila Heti

Had anyone suggested at the time that it would not be the Egypt of the pharaohs that would survive and change the moral landscape of the world, but instead a group of Hebrew slaves, it would have seemed the ultimate absurdity. — Sheila Heti

Sholem [a painter] was saying that freedom, for him, is having the technical facility to be able to execute whatever he wants, just whatever image he has in his mind. But that's not freedom! That's control, or power. Whereas I think Margaux understands freedom to be the freedom to take risks, the freedom to do something bad or appear foolish. To not recognize that difference is a pretty big thing. [ ... ]
"It's like with improv," Misha said. "True improv is about surprising yourself
but most people won't improvise truthfully. They're afraid. What they do is pull from their bag of tricks. They take what they already know how to do and apply it to the present situation. But that's cheating! And cheating's bad for an artist. It's bad in life
but it's really bad in art." -p.20-1, How Should A Person Be — Sheila Heti

I had to be so ugly that the humiliation I brought on myself would humiliate him, too. I would have to strip every last filament of golf from my skin - all the gold I had put there - and strip the fold from his skin, so that none of the gold on him would reflect onto me, and so we would be in utter darkness together. — Sheila Heti

When I strip away my dreams, what I imagine to be my potential, all the things I haven't said, what I imagine I feel for other people in the absence of my expressing it, all the rules I've made for myself that I don't follow
I see that I've done as little as anyone else in this world to deserve the grand moniker I. — Sheila Heti

When I'm editing, I try to bring out some dramatic structure. I think it is about theater in some way; it is a little play. — Sheila Heti