124 Quotes by Heidi Julavits

I really did for a few weeks think, I'm in pain because the world needs me to save it. Which is so ridiculous and egotistical.

A friend of mine urged me to see my pain as an opportunity. And since the same psychic that contacted Dion Fortune had told me that I was a "teacher" - she didn't mean at Columbia, she meant in the spiritual sense - I decided my affliction was the universe telling me that it was time to stop writing fiction and become the spiritual guru I was clearly meant to be.

The belief that one's suffering has a greater cosmic purpose, and is thus more exciting and more noble, well, it made a lot of sense to me.

I guess what I find so interesting about memory, and its role in a person's identity, is how the attempt to achieve accuracy requires you to remove yourself from your life in an authorial manner.

I go through life now reminding myself to remember something, and I do this while that something is happening. I'll be experiencing a moment and I'll say to myself, "Remember this!" Otherwise my whole life just blurs by.

I've subsequently become conscious of MAKING MEMORIES. Which makes me sound like a scrapbooker.

I used to have a really sharp memory. And its loss has proven destabilizing from an identity perspective.

Our cover has always been really important. For those of you who haven’t seen itCharles Burns, who is a graphic artist, does four portraits, so it’s split into quadrants and there’s four heads, basically—portraits of people. We’ve actually often thought and freaked out, what if something happened to Charles Burns? Because he’s so identified with the cover of our magazine, I don’t know what we would do if anything happened to Charles Burns.

When you are expending much energy on someone else's demise, it's like you weaken your psychic immune system.