Quotes from Sheila Heti

For art is not made for living bodies—it is made for the cold, eternal soul.

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

Happiness and joy are feeling like you belong to the world, and are at home in the world, at the level of nature, humanity and time.

Happily we run away from even the brightest and best things in our lives, because we are curious about what else is out there. And what else is out there? Just more of the same, whichever way you look. Whichever way you turn, it's the same life you're facing. It's the same life that's facing you.

She doesn't know why she spent so much of her life thinking about such trivial things, or looking at websites, when just outside her window there was a sky that was not trivial.

That was one thing about life we had to believe in, and that was transformation.

To fit oneself into the smallest spaces in the hopes of being loved -that is entirely womanly

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.

It was a reminder of what a human self was, and what a human life was: not a beautiful glass lamp just this side of being broken, or a lovely gold ring with a single dent in it. But a bettered old seashell, formed over millions of years, made to endure.

The lonely fill up their lives with books. I don't live in nature. I don't live in culture. I don't live in my relationships. I live in books. What good can all the books of the world be, penned by the loneliest men who ever lived?

That makes our hearts sink more than anything else, really, that the childless and the mothers are equivalent, but it must be so—that there is an exact equivalence and an equality, equal in emptiness and equal in fullness, equal in experiences had and equal in experiences lost, neither path better and neither path worse, neither more frightening or less riddled with fear.

You need tension in order to create something—the sand in the pearl. She said my questioning and doubts were the sand. She said they were good and forced me to live with integrity, to interrogate what was important to me, and so to live the meaning of my life, rather than resort to convention.

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,

God is most proud of creation as an aesthetic thing. You have only to look at the exquisite harmony of sky and trees and moon and stars to see what a good job God did, aesthetically.

But if my fate is truly my fate, then trying to escape it by doing whatever I can to make my life resemble some more beautiful thing will only lead me more quickly to the place I most fear. If there can be no escape from who I am, then I ought to reach my end honestly, able to tell myself, at least, that I have lived it with all of my being, making choices and deciding, and walking the whole way.

and how faithful; how faithful a book was, and how strong, a place you could be safe, apart from the world, held inside a world that would never grow weak, and which could pass through wars, massacres and floods-could pass through all of human history, and the integrity of its soul would stay strong.

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.

Maybe I have to think about myself less as a woman with this woman's special task, and more as an individual with her own special task—not put woman before my individuality.

I spent four hours last night on the Internet, reading accounts of women who suffer from their moods in ways that feel so familiar—they want to run away from their life half the month, and the other half, life feels fine.

Life rushed at her after her father died, as if to remind her that there can be no less life, that there can be no deprivation of life, that life is an endless and eternal living, even if your father is dead.

In death, he had given her what remained of his life, and this was the most beautiful thing. Perhaps we can only give in total beauty and simplicity in the moment of our dying, because that is the only giving that demands no return.

People should care for other people because they are familiar—because they're also humans—not because they're family.

The problem is the puer ever anticipates loss, disappointment, and suffering—which they foresee at the end of every experience, so they cut themselves off at the beginning, retreating almost at once in order to protect themselves.

What power a girl can have over a boy, to make him write such things! And what power a boy can have over a girl, to make her believe he has seen her fate. We don't know the effects we have on each other, but we have them.