Top 100 Sheila Heti Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “There’s so much writing I could have done and so many ideas that I had and so many things I wanted to work on that I didn’t. I like too much having things in my head rather than doing the work.”

— Sheila Heti

2. “He’s just another man who wants to teach me something.”

— Sheila Heti

3. “Maybe motherhood means honoring one’s mother.”

— Sheila Heti

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

— Sheila Heti

5. “In the transcribing and the editing, you want some retention of how the person speaks – you don’t want to edit out all of the hesitations and idiosyncrasies. And to get people to say something they’ve never said before. That’s big.”

— Sheila Heti

6. “What do humans go to art for, but to locate within themselves that inward-turning eye, which breathes significance into all of existence-for what is art but the act of infusing matter with the breath of God?”

— Sheila Heti

7. “There are times when things are clear in your head and your heart and everything comes all aligned and it’s easy and it just feels good to do something. But most of the time it’s not like that. Most of the time there’s conflict between your head and your heart.”

— Sheila Heti

8. “I like the jellyfish because it has no brain or heart. It’s just a thing that takes in the ocean through its mouth. I like that kind of ambition and simplicity.”

— Sheila Heti

9. “It’s so hard to live that one needs a support around life. We can’t live without some supernatural support.”

— Sheila Heti

10. “There are certain people who do not feel like they were raised by wolves, and they are the ones who make the world tick. They are the ones who keep everything functioning so the rest of us can worry about what sort of person we should be.”

— Sheila Heti

11. “I spend most of my time in my head. You can always work out solutions and satisfactions there. Maybe you can’t actually bring them about, but there’s usually a pleasant pillow of time between imagining you can, and realizing you cannot.”

— Sheila Heti

12. “It has long been known to me that certain objects want you as much as you want them. These are the ones that become important, the objects that you hold dear. The others fade from your life entirely. You wanted them, but they did not want you in return.”

— Sheila Heti

13. “There is something threatening about a woman who is not occupied with children. There is something at-loose-ends feeling about such a woman. What is she going to do instead? What sort of trouble will she make?”

— Sheila Heti

14. “Most people live their entire lives with their clothes on, and even if they wanted to, couldn’t take them off. Then there are those who cannot put them on. They are the ones who live their lives not just as people but as examples of people. They are destined to expose every part of themselves, so the rest of us can know what it means to be a human.”

— Sheila Heti

15. “I am obsessed with shopping for secondhand clothing. Nobody else has it, and it has a story that comes with it.”

— Sheila Heti

16. “We don’t know the effects we have on each other, but we have them.”

— Sheila Heti

17. “Perhaps I can carry my home on my back, if home is nothing but this cocoon, in which I can write and feel fine.”

— Sheila Heti

18. “How far beyond your mother do you hope to get? You are not going to be a different woman entirely, so just be a slightly altered version of her, and relax.”

— Sheila Heti

19. “In their quest for a life without failure, suffering, or doubt, that is what they achieve: a life empty of all those things that make a human life meaningful.”

— Sheila Heti

20. “Whether I want kids is a secret I keep from myself – it is the greatest secret I keep from myself.”

— Sheila Heti

21. “When I was in high school, and even to a degree while I was in university, I wasn’t on the Internet. So it’s not as embedded in my soul, that kind of way of being.”

— Sheila Heti

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

— Sheila Heti

23. “When I’m editing, I try to bring out some dramatic structure. I think it is about theater in some way; it is a little play.”

— Sheila Heti

24. “Maybe I feel betrayed by the woman inside of me who can’t bring herself to do this thing. Or maybe I feel betrayed by my mother, for not devoting herself to me and creating whatever loving memories must be created in a child to make her want to repeat the process again.”

— Sheila Heti

25. “Better to have your failure right in front of you than the fantasy in your head.”

— Sheila Heti

26. “You have to know where the funny is, and if you know where the funny is, you know everything.”

— Sheila Heti

27. “Then if he’s sore with me, let him dump my ass. That will just give me more time to be a genius.”

— Sheila Heti

28. “You need tension in order to create something – the sand in the pearl. She said my questioning and doubts were the sand. She said they were good and forced me to live with integrity, to interrogate what was important to me, and so to live the meaning of my life, rather than resort to convention.”

— Sheila Heti

29. “Life is not a harvest. Just because you have an apple doesn’t mean you have an orchard. You have an apple. Put a fence around it. Once you have put a fence around everything you value, then you have the total circle of your heart.”

— Sheila Heti

30. “I do feel it. And I’ve felt it my whole life, that the supernatural has a role in the world.”

— Sheila Heti

31. “I studied art history and philosophy and took economics and political science classes. I just took whatever I wanted and I didn’t worry about grades and I read and learned a lot, and I didn’t have much of a social life, so it was deeply absorbing.”

— Sheila Heti

32. “I think a lot of people try to edit themselves out and I think that’s a big mistake, because the person being interviewed is responding to a person, and if you don’t know who that person is then you don’t really know what’s going on with the person being interviewed.”

— Sheila Heti

33. “One good thing about being a woman is we haven’t too many examples yet of what a genius looks like. It could be me.”

— Sheila Heti

34. “So your values, happiness and the things the people around you need. Those are the things by which you should steer your life.”

— Sheila Heti

35. “Sometimes you do have people who are great at curating; sometimes you have people curating who don’t know what they’re do...”

— Sheila Heti

36. “I always had a fantasy of meeting a girl who was as serious as I was.”

— Sheila Heti

37. “Somehow I had turned myself into the worst thing in the world: I was just another man who wanted to teach me something!”

— Sheila Heti

38. “To fit oneself into the smallest spaces in the hopes of being loved -that is entirely womanly.”

— Sheila Heti

39. “It’s nice to go into your doom. It’s so liberating.”

— Sheila Heti

40. “There was not an awareness of pop culture in the household. There was a lot of respect for working hard, and for intellectual and professional achievement.”

— Sheila Heti

41. “She doesn’t want a baby – but her body doesn’t believe her. On some level, no one believes her. On some level, she doesn’t even believe herself.”

— Sheila Heti

42. “Now I was tired. All I wanted was to rest. The six days of Creation each have their own morning and evening, thereby showing their beginning and end. Only the seventh day has neither morning nor evening. It stands outside of Creation, belonging to the divine order alone. I wanted a day without morning or evening. I wanted a day of rest.”

— Sheila Heti

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

— Sheila Heti

44. “There are people whose learning is so great, they seem to inhabit a different realm of species-hood entirely. Somehow, they appear untroubled by the nullness. They are filled up with history and legends and beautiful poetry and all the gestures of all the great people down through time. When they talk, they are carried on a sea of their own belonging. It is like they were born to be fathers to us all.”

— Sheila Heti

45. “That makes our hearts sink more than anything else, really, that the childless and the mothers are equivalent, but it must be so – that there is an exact equivalence and an equality, equal in emptiness and equal in fullness, equal in experiences had and equal in experiences lost, neither path better and neither path worse, neither more frightening or less riddled with fear.”

— Sheila Heti

46. “My parents are both scientists, and I was raised without god.”

— Sheila Heti

47. “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.”

— Sheila Heti

48. “Living one way is not a criticism of every other way of living. Is that the threat of the woman without kids? Yet the woman without kids is not saying that no woman should have kids, or that you-woman with a stroller- have made the wrong choice. Her decision about her life is no statement about yours. One person’s life is not a political or general statement about how all lives should be. Other lives should be able to exist alongside our own without any threat or judgment at all.”

— Sheila Heti

49. “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.”

— Sheila Heti

50. “There is a kind of sadness in not wanting the things that give so many other people their life’s meaning.”

— Sheila Heti