Top 100 Sheila Heti Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Happily we run away from even the brightest and best things in our lives, because we are curious about what else is out there. And what else is out there? Just more of the same, whichever way you look. Whichever way you turn, it’s the same life you’re facing. It’s the same life that’s facing you.”

— Sheila Heti

52. “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.”

— Sheila Heti

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

— Sheila Heti

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

— Sheila Heti

55. “Alone, one feels the whole universe, and none of one’s personality.”

— Sheila Heti

56. “Maybe that’s good to not feel like you have to keep up when there’s so much to keep up with right now. It’s bottomless.”

— Sheila Heti

57. “It’s fun to give pleasure to people.”

— Sheila Heti

58. “To go on and on about your soul is to miss the whole point of life. I could say that with more certainty if I knew the whole point of life.”

— Sheila Heti

59. “Happiness and joy are feeling like you belong to the world, and are at home in the world, at the level of nature, humanity and time.”

— Sheila Heti

60. “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.”

— Sheila Heti

61. “I kind of try to resist working a lot. I’m not a very disciplined worker.”

— Sheila Heti

62. “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.”

— Sheila Heti

63. “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.”

— Sheila Heti

64. “But if my fate is truly my fate, then trying to escape it by doing whatever I can to make my life resemble some more beautiful thing will only lead me more quickly to the place I most fear. If there can be no escape from who I am, then I ought to reach my end honestly, able to tell myself, at least, that I have lived it with all of my being, making choices and deciding, and walking the whole way.”

— Sheila Heti

65. “Maybe I have to think about myself less as a woman with this woman’s special task, and more as an individual with her own special task – not put woman before my individuality.”

— Sheila Heti

66. “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!”

— Sheila Heti

67. “Life rushed at her after her father died, as if to remind her that there can be no less life, that there can be no deprivation of life, that life is an endless and eternal living, even if your father is dead.”

— Sheila Heti

68. “The lonely fill up their lives with books. I don’t live in nature. I don’t live in culture. I don’t live in my relationships. I live in books. What good can all the books of the world be, penned by the loneliest men who ever lived?”

— Sheila Heti

69. “And a glimpse into one heart is a glimpse into many.”

— Sheila Heti

70. “With a few people one’s life, too much happens emotionally-more than even makes sense to happen, given how little has actually occurred. Such people are deeply igniting in a way that others are not. This igniting always happens in the very first instant and never goes away. No stupidities can destroy the igniting, so even if those two people never meet again, a connection always remains.”

— Sheila Heti

71. “For art is not made for living bodies – it is made for the cold, eternal soul.”

— Sheila Heti

72. “Love is a battle between the sexes in which the man always wins because that’s more erotic for everyone!”

— Sheila Heti

73. “Unwilling to be naked, I had made her naked instead.”

— Sheila Heti

74. “It is the flowers in the soul of the person who put them there that make us happy and enliven our hearts. The beauty of the flowers is a clue to the beauty of a human heart. They are a keyhole into a human heart.”

— Sheila Heti

75. “She was alone so she could hear herself thinking. She was alone so she could hear herself living.”

— Sheila Heti

76. “She wanted a love that would cool her down, to the temperature of the living. She longed to be held by the coldest hands.”

— Sheila Heti

77. “Women apologize too much, I once decided, and made myself stop, and now found it incredibly difficult to tell anyone I was sorry.”

— Sheila Heti

78. “But being unlikeable wasn’t the reason she was alone. She was alone so she could hear herself thinking. She was alone so she could hear herself living.”

— Sheila Heti

79. “The heart of the artist is a little bit hollow. The bones of the artist are a little bit hollow. The brain of the artist is a little bit hollow. But this allows them to fly.”

— Sheila Heti

80. “It was a reminder of what a human self was, and what a human life was: not a beautiful glass lamp just this side of being broken, or a lovely gold ring with a single dent in it. But a bettered old seashell, formed over millions of years, made to endure.”

— Sheila Heti

81. “What if I’ve suppressed my desire for children so much that my desire is unrecognizable to me?”

— Sheila Heti

82. “The other night out at the bars, I learned that Nietzsche wrote on a typewriter. It is unbelievable to me, and I no longer feel that his philosophy has the same validity or aura of truth that it formerly did. No other detail of his life situating him so squarely in the modern age could have affected me as much as learning this. He typed Zarathustra? Goddamnit, the man had no more connection to the truth than a stenographer!”

— Sheila Heti

83. “In the cosmic landscape, plants have front-row seats. God is thrilled to have an audience of creation made up mostly of plant life: trees and bushes, flowers and berries, sitting down to enjoy the show, and saying at intermission, What a romp!”

— Sheila Heti

84. “God is most proud of creation as an aesthetic thing. You have only to look at the exquisite harmony of sky and trees and moon and stars to see what a good job God did, aesthetically.”

— Sheila Heti

85. “People should care for other people because they are familiar – because they’re also humans – not because they’re family.”

— Sheila Heti

86. “The most compelling women are the ones who are distinctive, who are most like themselves and least like other women.”

— Sheila Heti

87. “She doesn’t know why she spent so much of her life thinking about such trivial things, or looking at websites, when just outside her window there was a sky that was not trivial.”

— Sheila Heti

88. “Sometimes I think that in not wanting children, I’m preparing for my old age. I know what I want my old age to look like, more than I know almost anything else: a simple home, a simple life, no one needing me for anything, and not needing anyone the way I do now.”

— Sheila Heti

89. “Why did it seem like the only way to live-was to disobey?”

— Sheila Heti

90. “Ask only whether you are living your values, not whether the boxes are ticked.”

— Sheila Heti

91. “It’s like being a good curator – like Barnes – getting the combination of everything so right that nobody even questions it; making a hard thing look easy.”

— Sheila Heti

92. “That was one thing about life we had to believe in, and that was transformation.”

— Sheila Heti

93. “When we try to turn ourselves into a beautiful object, it is because we mistakenly consider ourselves to be an object, when a human being is really the other two: a gesture, and a reproduction of the human type.”

— Sheila Heti

94. “Both making life and making art are pouring spirit into form.”

— Sheila Heti

95. “The problem is the puer ever anticipates loss, disappointment, and suffering – which they foresee at the end of every experience, so they cut themselves off at the beginning, retreating almost at once in order to protect themselves.”

— Sheila Heti

96. “But style, I also learned, is not about strictly copying others, because style is not transferable.”

— Sheila Heti

97. “And what opens one heart opens many.”

— Sheila Heti

98. “But life isn’t only where things are exciting; it’s where things feel hard and stagnant, too.”

— Sheila Heti

99. “It suddenly seemed like a huge conspiracy to keep women in their thirties – when you finally have some brains and some skills and experience – from doing anything useful with them at all.”

— Sheila Heti

100. “The last thing that’s needed is to judge your own heart, but then that’s the first thing you go and do. A heart rushes to judge itself. A heart should have better things to do. A heart doesn’t.”

— Sheila Heti