23 Quotes by Heather Havrilesky

It takes work to shift your focus from the smudges on the window to the view outside.

We are encouraged to believe in our dreams, but we are assumed to dream in the same limited palette as everyone else. We are to view ourselves as unique snowflakes only as it facilitates more efficiently melting ourselves into bottled spring water.

Even natural wonders aren’t what they used to be, because nothing can be experienced without commentary. In the 1950s, we worried about how TV would affect our culture. Now our entire lives are a terrible talk show that we can’t turn off. It often feels like we’re struggling to find ourselves and each other in a crowded, noisy room. We are plagued, around the clock, by the shouting and confusion and fake intimacy of the global community, mid-nervous breakdown.

Yet this chirpy insistence on positivity has a strange way of enhancing the dread and anxiety and melancholy that lie just beneath the surface of things.

When everything is bent into a jolly shape, everything feels more mournful than it should.

Other people will always appear to move with dedication and consequence. How else does a person behave when people are watching?

The more I have, The more I realize that all that matters is the small discoveries, the little interactions, the improvised, messy, glued-together moments that lie at the centre of our happiness. Everything else is just a distraction.

Spending more money ensures greater happiness. This is the confused thinking of the duped consumer.

Day in and day out, you are pestered by Barney the Dinosaur, singing about how much everyone loves everyone else and demanding that you turn your frown upside down, in a voice so drippily emphatic that you might like to fashion a shiv out of your sippy cup and gut that purple menace where he stands.