172 Quotes by Sheila Heti

I spent four hours last night on the Internet, reading accounts of women who suffer from their moods in ways that feel so familiar – they want to run away from their life half the month, and the other half, life feels fine.

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

Perhaps our vision of how life should be is actually no fun at all, and neglects to include the exciting people we have yet to meet, who make the stupid ways life seems to happen, happy after all.

I love the people who exist already, and there are so many books to read, and so much silence to inhabit.

Also, I knew that if I said a single word, I would burst into tears, as I always did, always had, my entire life, whenever anything difficult had to be discussed. It always was too scary; a threat I had felt since childhood that at any moment a relationship might disappear with a poof because of something little I had done or said.

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.

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

When I was younger, I think that I felt like I could only live one way, and I had to figure out which of those one ways it was going to be. I have no anxiety about making the wrong decision.

I don't really have a schedule; I just get up in the morning. I work at home. I don't feel that my work is a separate thing from living - I get ideas about what I want to write about from the real things that I'm worrying about as I live.