Quotes from Sheila Heti

But style, I also learned, is not about strictly copying others, because style is not transferable.

The most compelling women are the ones who are distinctive, who are most like themselves and least like other women.

And another dark shadow on a dark lawn: the fact that for a woman of curiosity, no decision will ever feel like the right one. In both, too much is missing.

It's like being a good curator—like Barnes—getting the combination of everything so right that nobody even questions it; making a hard thing look easy.

And a glimpse into one heart is a glimpse into many.

Ask only whether you are living your values, not whether the boxes are ticked.

And what opens one heart opens many.

With a few people one's life, too much happens emotionally-more than even makes sense to happen, given how little has actually occurred. Such people are deeply igniting in a way that others are not. This igniting always happens in the very first instant and never goes away. No stupidities can destroy the igniting, so even if those two people never meet again, a connection always remains.

When I strip away my dreams, what i imagine to be my potential, all the things I haven't aid, 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.

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

When we try to turn ourselves into a beautiful object, it is because we mistakenly consider ourselves to be an object, when a human being is really the other two: a gesture, and a reproduction of the human type.

The heart of the artist is a little bit hollow. The bones of the artist are a little bit hollow. The brain of the artist is a little bit hollow. But this allows them to fly.

How could I castrate my mind--neuter it!--and build up a resistance to know what was mine from what was everyone else's, and finally be in the world in my own way? That endless capacity for empathy--which you have to really kill in order to act freely, to know your own desires!

Life is not a harvest. Just because you have an apple doesn't mean you have an orchard. You have an apple.

Do I want children because I want to be admired as the admirable sort of woman who has children? Because I want to be seen as a normal sort of woman, or because I want to be the best kind of woman, a woman with not only work, but the desire and ability to nurture, a body that can make babies, and someone who another person wants to make babies with? Do I want a child to show myself to be the (normal) sort of woman who wants and ultimately has a child?

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.

How could the waves do it, through each and every moment, and so naturally, as if it was for the first time, as if it was for the last time, as if it was for the middle time, as if it would go on forever, and as if it would one day end. The sea moved forward and back with all of these possibilities, and all of them were true.

The Jewish religion says it's not a child until it's two-thirds out of the woman's body--until the head has completely emerged.

Stripped of the glamour and beauty of youth, everything we ever did-it all looks different now. We can see our choices as acts in themselves, not stages on life's way, for if progress in human history is an illusion, so is progress in a human life.

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.

As I was watching, I thought about how unfair it was that she and I had to think about having kids—that we had to sit here talking about it, feeling like if we didn't have children, we would always regret it. It suddenly seemed like a huge conspiracy to keep women in their thirties—when you finally have some brains and some skills and experience—from doing anything useful with them at all.

Za ženske se ?as vedno izteka. Medtem ko moški menda živijo v kraljestvu brez?asja. V razsežnosti moških ni ?asa - zgolj prostor. Samo pomisli, da bi živela v kraljestvu prostora in ne ?asa!

You were very loving to me and i only remember the loving parts of you now

I named this wrestling place motherhood for here's where I saw God face-to-face and yet my life was spared.