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Quote by Sheila Heti

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Motherhood

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Sheila Heti
Sheila Heti

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

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“There comes a time or two in life when you should face isolation. No, you have to. Constantly being accompanied, having someone by your side always and forever -- that is far more abnormal and creepy. I'm positive you can only learn and feel certain things when you're alone. If there are lessons to gain from having friends, then so also are there lessons from not having friends. These two things are two sides of the same coin and should be treated as equally valuable. So this moment, too, will also have worth for that girl.”

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Book:やはり俺の青春ラブコメはまちがっている。4
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“Her, enveloped in the smell of the snow, and her cold fingertips, and the sound of the black clouds drifting through the sky so high above, and her heart, and my feelings, and our apartment. . . The snow soaks up every sound. Only the sounds of the train she rides reach my pricked-up ears. I . . . and probably she, too . . . like this world, I think.”

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Book:She and Her Cat
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“Not the Happiness but the Consequence of Happiness He wakes up in the silence of the winter woods, the silence of birds not singing, knowing he will not hear his voice all day. He remembers what the brown owl sounded like while he was sleeping. The man wakes in the frigid morning thinking about women. Not with desire so much as with a sense of what is not. The January silence is the sound of his feet in the snow, a squirrel scolding, or the scraping calls of a single blue jay. Something of him dances there, apart and gravely mute. Many days in the woods he wonders what it is that he has for so long hunted down. We go hand in hand, he thinks, into the dark pleasure, but we are rewarded alone, just as we are married into aloneness. He walks the paths doing the strange mathematics of the brain, multiplying the spirit. He thinks of caressing her feet as she kept dying. For the last four hours, watching her gradually stop as the hospital slept. Remembers the stunning coldness of her head when he kissed her just after. There is light or more light, darkness and less darkness. It is, he decides, a quality without definition. How strange to discover that one lives with the heart as one lives with a wife. Even after many years, nobody knows what she is like. The heart has a life of its own. It gets free of us, escapes, is ambitiously unfaithful. Dies out unaccountably after eight years, blooms unnecessarily and too late. Like the arbitrary silence in the white woods, leaving tracks in the snow he cannot recognize.”

AlonenessWidowed
Book:Refusing Heaven: Poems
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“It is only the mind which does not belong that can be alone. And aloneness is not something to be cultivated. You see this? When you see all this, you are out, and no governor or president is going to invite you to dinner. Out of that aloneness there is humility. It is this aloneness that knows love—not power. The ambitious man, religious or ordinary, will never know what love is. So, if one sees all this, then one has this quality of total living and therefore total action. This comes through self-knowledge. Krishnamurti, Jiddu. The Book of Life: Daily Meditations with Krishnamurti (Kindle Locations 933-936). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.”

FreedomPowerHumilitySelf KnowledgeAloneness
Book:The Book of Life: Daily Meditations With Krishnamurti
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“It is only the mind which does not belong that can be alone. And aloneness is not something to be cultivated. You see this? When you see all this, you are out, and no governor or president is going to invite you to dinner. Out of that aloneness there is humility. It is this aloneness that knows love—not power. The ambitious man, religious or ordinary, will never know what love is. So, if one sees all this, then one has this quality of total living and therefore total action. This comes through self-knowledge.”

FreedomPowerHumilitySelf KnowledgeAloneness
Author:Jiddu Krishnamurti
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“And did the distress I was feeling derive from some internal sickness of the soul, or was it imposed on me by the sickness of society? That someone besides me had suffered from these ambiguities and had seen light on their far side... that I could find company and consolation and hope in an object pulled almost at random from a bookshelf—felt akin to an instance of religious grace.”

ReadingLiteratureBooksWordsAloneness
Book:How to Be Alone
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