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Sheila Heti Books

Writer

Sheila Heti is a Canadian writer born on December 25, 1976. Her works are known for their unique narrative style and profound self-reflection.

Pure Colour

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How Should a Person Be?: A Novel from Life

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Motherhood

A source page for quotes linked to Sheila Heti.

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How Should a Person Be?

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Women Pregnancy

Book:Motherhood

Source: Motherhood

“Za ženske se čas vedno izteka. Medtem ko moški menda živijo v kraljestvu brezčasja. V razsežnosti moških ni časa - zgolj prostor. Samo pomisli, da bi živela v kraljestvu prostora in ne časa!”

Women žEnske

Book:Motherhood

Source: Motherhood

“Najbolj ženski problem je, da si ne odmeriš dovolj prostora ali časa ali pa ti tega ne dovolijo. Strpamo se v trenutke, ki si jih dopustimo, ali v trenutke, ki so nam jih dopustili drugi. Ne pretegujemo se ležerno v času, ampak si skopo odkazujemo najmanjše odmerke časa, v katerih naj bivamo. Pustimo, da vsi tiščijo v nas. Same do sebe skoparimo s prostorom in časom.”

Women

Book:Motherhood

Source: Motherhood

“What do humans go to art for, but to locate within themselves that inward-turning eye, which breathes significance into all of existence”

Art Humanity Psychology Self Improvement

Book:Pure Colour

Source: Pure Colour

“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.”

Love Love At First Sight

Book:Pure Colour

Source: Pure Colour

“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.”

Loneliness Living Adulthood

Book:Pure Colour

Source: Pure Colour

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

Writing Home Self Sufficiency Safe Space Cocoon

Author:Sheila Heti

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

Life Change Transformation

Book:Pure Colour

Source: Pure Colour

“Maybe Mira has no heart. Maybe a heart comes and goes. Maybe her heart is protecting her against pain. Perhaps it will start working later on. Perhaps her heart got tired long ago, and collapsed and was left by the side of the road. Maybe one day it will start to feel again. Maybe it has run out of feelings. Anything can run out of anything. A thought can run out of words.”

Heart

Book:Pure Colour

Source: Pure Colour

“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.”

Heart

Book:Pure Colour

Source: Pure Colour

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

Love Heart

Book:Pure Colour

Source: Pure Colour

“And what opens one heart opens many.”

Love Heart

Book:Pure Colour

Source: Pure Colour

“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.”

Life Self Resilience

Book:Pure Colour

Source: Pure Colour

“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.”

Self Dreams Identity

Book:How Should a Person Be?

Source: How Should a Person Be?

“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!”

Self Identity Empathy Guilt Co Dependency

Book:How Should a Person Be?

Source: How Should a Person Be?

“Now we find ourselves in the knowledge of what is cheating. It is cheating to treat oneself as an object, or as an image to tend to, or as an icon.”

Self Memoir Objectivism Object Icon

Book:How Should a Person Be?

Source: How Should a Person Be?

“MARGAUX To lack an overwhelming empathy. I sometimes feel pretty paralyzed by my own feelings of empathy. And it's still such a problem-shame. Maybe what I want in my life is to cut out a bit of the empathy and a bit of the shame.”

Life Feelings Empathy Meaning

Book:How Should a Person Be?

Source: How Should a Person Be?

“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?”

Loneliness Books

Book:Motherhood

Source: Motherhood

“Time is always ticking for women. Whereas men, apparently, live in a timeless realm. In the dimension of men, there is no time - just space. Imagine living the realm of space, not time! You put your dick into spaces, and the bigger your dick, the cosier the space. If you have a very big dick, then space - and life - must be very cosy indeed. Imagine having a very small dick - how vast and unknowable the universe must be to the small-dicked man! But if your dick is the size of most of what you encounter, nothing could be very threatening at all. For women, the problem is different. A fourteen-year-old girl has so much time to be raped and have babies that she is like the greatest Midas. The time-span of a woman’s life is about thirty years. Apparently, during these thirty years - fourteen to fourty-four - everything must be done. She must find a man, make babies, start and accelerate her career, avoid diseases, and collect enough money in a private account so that her husband can’t gamble their life’s savings away. Thirty years is not enough time to live a whole life! It’s not enough time to do all of everything. If I have only done one thing with my time, this is surely what I’ll castigate myself for later. The day will come when I’ll think, ‘What the fuck did you waste all those years putting in commas for?’ I will have no idea how I could have been so naive about how time acts in the life of a woman; how it is the essential realm in which a woman lives. All the things I neglected to do because I refused to believe, fundamentally, that first and foremost I was female. You women who wish to live in the realm of space, not time - you will see what gifts the universe has waiting. ‘Will I?’ Yes. Just look around. ‘But some women are happy!’ But some women are not. ‘How do I know which I will be?’ You cannot know until it’s too late.”

Men Women Motherhood Sheila Heti

Author:Sheila Heti

“It is the flowers in the soul of the person who put them there that make us happy and enliven our hearts. The beauty of the flowers is a clue to the beauty of a human heart. They are a keyhole into a human heart.”

Beauty Flowers

Book:Pure Colour

Source: Pure Colour

“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.”

God Nature Beauty Harmony

Book:Pure Colour

Source: Pure Colour

“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.”

Birth Human Abortion Child Fetus

Book:Motherhood

Source: Motherhood

“She had thought that when someone died, it would be like they went into a different room. She had not known that life itself transformed itself into into a different room, and trapped you in it without them.”

Death Grief Grieving Death Of A Loved One

Book:Pure Colour

Source: Pure Colour

“She had thought that when someone died, it would be like they went into a different room. She had not known that life itself transformed itself into a different room, and trapped you in it without them.”

Death Grief Grieving Grief And Loss

Book:Pure Colour

Source: Pure Colour

“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.”

Children Feminism Child Rearing

Book:Motherhood

Source: Motherhood

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

Aloneness

Book:Motherhood

Source: Motherhood

“Life is not a harvest. Just because you have an apple doesn’t mean you have an orchard. You have an apple. Put a fence around it. Once you have put a fence around everything you value, then you have the total circle of your heart.”

Heart Harvest Fences

Book:How Should a Person Be?

Source: How Should a Person Be?

“One good thing about being a woman is we haven't too many examples yet of what a genius looks like. It could be me.”

Looks Women Havens Example Genius Good Things Being A Woman

Book:How Should a Person Be?: A Novel from Life

Source: How Should a Person Be?: A Novel from Life

“I spend most of my time in my head. You can always work out solutions and satisfactions there. Maybe you can't actually bring them about, but there's usually a pleasant pillow of time between imagining you can, and realizing you cannot.”

Thinking Realizing Solutions Satisfaction Work Out Pleasant My Time Pillow

Author:Sheila Heti

“Writing fiction is a good way to inhabit other minds, if not other lives.”

Ifs Way Writing Mind Fiction Good Way Writing Fiction

Author:Sheila Heti

“I studied art history and philosophy and took economics and political science classes. I just took whatever I wanted and I didn't worry about grades and I read and learned a lot, and I didn't have much of a social life, so it was deeply absorbing.”

Art Philosophy Wanted Political Social Class Worry Economics Grades Political Science Social Life Absorbing Art History Science Class

Author:Sheila Heti

“I feel like one can have all of that as a writer; you're writing, you're reading, you're talking to interesting and intelligent people. Your life is structured around whatever book you're writing, and so is your reading and so are many of your conversations.”

People Feels Writing Book Life Is Reading Interesting Talking Conversation Intelligent

Author:Sheila Heti

“I've always had individual friends, but I didn't find the people I wanted to learn from as an adult until my midtwenties.”

People Wanted Individual Adults

Author:Sheila Heti

“I'm in a serious monogamous relationship, and I don't want to keep having different boyfriends, and I have this instead - with men and women. It's better. Instead of having sex, we have art.”

Men Want Art Different Sex Serious Men And Women Having Sex Monogamous Relationship

Author:Sheila Heti

“Sometimes you do have people who are great at curating; sometimes you have people curating who don't know what they're do.”

People Knows Sometimes

Author:Sheila Heti

“There was not an awareness of pop culture in the household. There was a lot of respect for working hard, and for intellectual and professional achievement.”

Hard Culture Awareness Achievement Intellectual Pops Household Pop Culture

Author:Sheila Heti

“Maybe that's good to not feel like you have to keep up when there's so much to keep up with right now. It's bottomless.”

Feels Like You Right Now

Author:Sheila Heti

“When I was in high school, and even to a degree while I was in university, I wasn't on the Internet. So it's not as embedded in my soul, that kind of way of being.”

Way Kind Soul School Internet Degrees High School University My Soul Embedded

Author:Sheila Heti

“Literature and art are one of a number of relationships I have with the world. Like you have relationships with your friends and a relationship with your lover and your relationship with your family and your relationship with your work - sometimes it's really great; sometimes it's non-existent, sometimes it's fruitful.”

World Art Sometimes Literature Numbers Like You Lovers Our Family Our Relationship Really Great Literature And Art

Author:Sheila Heti

“I kind of try to resist working a lot. I'm not a very disciplined worker.”

Trying Kind Workers Working A Lot

Author:Sheila Heti

“There's so much writing I could have done and so many ideas that I had and so many things I wanted to work on that I didn't. I like too much having things in my head rather than doing the work.”

Writing Ideas Done Wanted Too Much

Author:Sheila Heti

“There are times when things are clear in your head and your heart and everything comes all aligned and it's easy and it just feels good to do something. But most of the time it's not like that. Most of the time there's conflict between your head and your heart.”

Feels Heart Easy Clear Conflict Feel Good

Author:Sheila Heti

“It's nice to go into your doom. It's so liberating.”

Nice Doom Liberating

Author:Sheila Heti

“It's so hard to live that one needs a support around life. We can't live without some supernatural support.”

Needs Hard Support

Author:Sheila Heti

“My parents are both scientists, and I was raised without god.”

Parent Scientist Raised Without God

Author:Sheila Heti

“I do feel it. And I've felt it my whole life, that the supernatural has a role in the world.”

World Feels Whole Felt Roles Whole Life

Author:Sheila Heti

“It's fun to give pleasure to people.”

People Giving Fun Pleasure

Author:Sheila Heti

“When I'm editing, I try to bring out some dramatic structure. I think it is about theater in some way; it is a little play.”

Thinking Way Trying Littles Play Theater Structure Dramatic Editing

Author:Sheila Heti

“I think a lot of people try to edit themselves out and I think that's a big mistake, because the person being interviewed is responding to a person, and if you don't know who that person is then you don't really know what's going on with the person being interviewed.”

People Ifs Thinking Knows Trying Persons Bigs Mistake Responding Edits Big Mistake

Author:Sheila Heti

“In the transcribing and the editing, you want some retention of how the person speaks - you don't want to edit out all of the hesitations and idiosyncrasies. And to get people to say something they've never said before. That's big.”

People Want Persons Said Bigs Speak Editing Edits Hesitation Idiosyncrasies Retention Transcribing

Author:Sheila Heti

About the Author

Born: December 25, 1976
Known for: Writer
Quotes: 61

Books & Sources

Pure ColourRelated source material

How Should a Person Be?: A Novel from LifeRelated source material

MotherhoodRelated source material

How Should a Person Be?Related source material

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Sheila Heti Books

Pure Colour

How Should a Person Be?: A Novel from Life

Motherhood

How Should a Person Be?

Related Quotes