Quotes from Sheila Heti

Both making life and making art are pouring spirit into form.

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.

The last thing that's needed is to judge your own heart, but then that's the first thing you go and do. A heart rushes to judge itself. A heart should have better things to do. A heart doesn't.

Alone, one feels the whole universe, and none of one's personality.

Why did it seem like the only way to live-was to disobey?

So your values, happiness and the things the people around you need. Those are the things by which you should steer your life.

There is a kind of sadness in not wanting the things that give so many other people their life's meaning.

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

So many gifts her father gave her, so she should not be surprised they continued to be given, even in the moment of his dying. ...The gifts of patience, perspective, and detachment. The gifts of silence, irrelevance, and joy.

I love the people who exist already, and there are so many books to read, and so much silence to inhabit.

What do humans go to art for, but to locate within themselves that inward-turning eye, which breathes significance into all of existence-for what is art but the act of infusing matter with the breath of God?

Whether I want kids is a secret I keep from myself—it is the greatest secret I keep from myself.

For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it

How far beyond your mother do you hope to get? You are not going to be a different woman entirely, so just be a slightly altered version of her, and relax.

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.

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.

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.

Maybe motherhood means honoring one's mother.

She was alone so she could hear herself thinking. She was alone so she could hear herself living.

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.

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

Perhaps I can carry my home on my back, if home is nothing but this cocoon, in which I can write and feel fine.

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 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.