172 Quotes by Sheila Heti

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.

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!

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.

Sholem was saying that freedom, for him, is having the technical facility to be able to execute whatever he wants, just whatever image he has in mind. But that's not freedom! That's control, or power. Whereas I think Margaux understands freedom to be the freedom to take risks, the freedom to do something bad or to appear foolish. To not recognize that difference is a pretty big thing. p. 19

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

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.

We tried not to smile, for smiling only encourages men to bore you and waste your time.

If now in some ways I drink too much, it’s not that I lack a reverence for the world.