Quotes from Sheila Heti

We're so sure of what our unlived lives would have been like that we feel guilty for not living them - for not living up to our potential.

There's something threatening about a woman who is not occupied with children... What sort of trouble will she make?

It's so weird how our existence hinges on just absolute crazy chance, but it feels so essential. It's like, 'Nothing would be here if you weren't here,' because you are the centre of your universe.

Everyone has to put clothes on in the morning, and it's interesting to see how much people's personal histories come into that decision.

The thing I worry about is, what happens when your talent flees? Because you see that with writers sometimes: they start writing these awful books. And there's something sort of horrifying about it.

I don't really have a schedule; I just get up in the morning. I work at home. I don't feel that my work is a separate thing from living - I get ideas about what I want to write about from the real things that I'm worrying about as I live.

Raffi Cavoukian was born in Cairo in 1948 and moved with his Armenian parents to Toronto when he was 10.

Toronto is my home. It's where my family is. I think I feel an obligation to be within subway distance of the people who raised me.

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

There is something threatening about a woman who is not occupied with children. There is something at-loose-ends feeling about such a woman. What is she going to do instead? What sort of trouble will she make?

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.

The conversation went on for another half hour, before this man's girlfriend, who had not said much of anything until then, remarked, Being a woman, you can't just say you don't want a child. You have to have some big plan or idea of what you're going to do instead. And it better be something great. And you had better be able to tell it convincingly - before it even happens - what the arc of your life will be.

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

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.

It is only when you get older that everyone makes you feel bad about being alone, or implies that spending time with other people is somehow better, because it proves you to be likeable. But being unlikeable wasn't the reason she was alone. She was alone so she could hear herself thinking. She was alone so she could hear herself living.

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.

boundaries, Sheila. Barriers. We need them. They let you love someone. Otherwise you might kill them.

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

Living one way is not a criticism of every other way of living. Is that the threat of the woman without kids? Yet the woman without kids is not saying that no woman should have kids, or that you-woman with a stroller- have made the wrong choice. Her decision about her life is no statement about yours. One person's life is not a political or general statement about how all lives should be. Other lives should be able to exist alongside our own without any threat or judgment at all.

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.

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

When I was younger, thinking about whether I wanted children, I always came back to this formula: if no one had told me anything about the world, I would have invented boyfriends. I would have invented sex, friendship, art. I would not have invented child-rearing.

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

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.