Quotes from Heidi Julavits

Bookshelves of summer houses are filled with dishy nonsense. They indicate how a person understands time is meant to be wasted.

To kill yourself was to say to your family members, I can no longer live with myself. To vanish was to say, I can no longer live with you.

Why do I need credit for my desire? It's ridiculous. But I do.

Days were ages. Loved bloomed and died in a day.

Sometimes I don't think any of us really believes anything we say; we are just defending our kind.

Good questions can initiate a surprising wend toward an answer that is neither right nor wrong, but that can be judged as strong or weak or honest or dishonest on the basis of the steps that brought the answerer there. It is a built thing. Sometimes what it builds is bullshit, but the bullshit can be so well-constructed that it has integrity, a pattern integrity. This can be worth admiring.

In most couples there is the person who wins and the person who doesn't. The winner isn't necessarily stronger or smarter or righter. The winner is the person who won't give up, and the non-winner ("loser" is not the correct word for the person who does not win), at a certain point, realizes the battle is a silly one, and the spoils are not worth the extended warfare.

In her brain she runs a computer program to evade dooms no one has even considered. There's nothing she hasn't thought of, and thought of and thought of, poor woman.

A famous university in theory might sound exciting, but in reality it's just a bunch of buildings, and often some droopy balloons hanging from an iron banister, and a loose gathering of people that might be a poorly attended Falun Gong liberation protest, or some students playing Assassin.

It was new there even if it was nowhere.

I have begun to fact-check my e-mail jokes, and my e-mails generally, even though I do not use capital letters or proper punctuation. "we write everything lowercase in order to save time," said Herbert Bayer—herbert bayer—of the Bauhaus school. When I discovered this quote I felt so reassured. I'd always worried that I'd naturally defaulted to lowercase letters because I lacked courage or conviction or a healthy sense of self-worth.

You are a medium," Marta said. "Although so is everybody a medium, an involuntary host to free-floating misery. But you're a more available one.

We've known Emily, my husband and I, for two full seasons. We first met her on The Bachelor, Season Fifteen; she competed with seventeen other girls for the heart of Brad, such as it was.

Getting jobs is like winning domestic arguments on a grand scale, and then getting paid for it.

Sometimes when you are in a foreign country it feels like everyone is in on a joke against you.

But my illness, even in its absence, made it hard for me to enjoy life. Good health means being unaware of one's health. I was not yet unaware.

I am simply looking for a companion with whom to spend my days, a companion who will cherish as much as I the stupidity of living in the moment, and spend every dull, amazing second with me.

I can't even tell you what else I imagined. I can only humiliate myself to such a degree; at a certain point it becomes humorous, and this story is not meant to be humorous. This story is meant to winch your ribs open and tamper with your heart. This story is meant to make you realize that your chances of happiness in this world are terribly slim if you lack a fine imagination.

I've always said that you were too smart to have a profession. Smart people are hopeless in the face of anything actual. They are terrible cooks. They cannot dress themselves. They are children who need guidance and protecting.

We're taught to find the antecedents to our adult failures in childhood traumas, and so we spend our lives looking bacwards and pointing fingers, rather than bucking up and forging ahead. But what if your childhood was all a big misunderstanding? An elaborate ruse? What does that say about failure? Better yet, what does that say about potential?

I take you for a girl who's eager to grow unstable at the first indication that things can come back to haunt a person, even after she has given them up for dead.

When I write, I am trying through the movement of my fingers to reach my head. I'm trying to build a word ladder up to my brain.

My behavior makes perfect sense to me.

In the midst of such uncertainty, I cling not to what I know, but what I feel.