Steven Heighton > Quotes

“Interest is never enough. If it doesn't haunt you, you'll never write it well. What haunts and obsesses you may, with luck and labour, interest your readers. What merely interests you is sure to bore them. (from Workbook)”
― Steven Heighton

“To listen to critics, pro or con, and take their words to heart is to subcontract your self-esteem to strangers. (from Workbook)”
― Steven Heighton

“Boredom is the laboratory where new enthusiasms prepare themselves,”
― Steven Heighton

“Love . . . requires that you learn to read the lover in her own language, not translate her into yours.”
― Steven Heighton, On earth as it is

“Let failure be your workshop. See it for what is is: the world walking you through a tough but necessary semester, free of tuition. (from Workbook)”
― Steven Heighton

“The idiot willingness to choose sides is what feeds the abattoir of history.”
― Steven Heighton

“The dreamtime of creative work is a turnstile to eternity. (from Workbok)”
― Steven Heighton

“An Elegy, Years After Sarah”

So her ceiling a map of stars. First time we made love
late afternoon late winter, and after she slept
how her room fogged up with dusk
and paper stars she’d stuck up there in childhood
came out in strange constellations
and I missed the earth
till her room was night her breath deepening the stars
cooling down: I said come closer and her eyes
— half-open, flashing back whatever light there was — went out.”
― Steven Heighton, The Ecstasy of Skeptics: Poems

“Cast a spell and the small flaws don't matter. (From Workbook)”
― Steven Heighton

“Hopefulness, Nhat Hanh suggests, is a harmful emotion because it’s based on an illusion. A hope is not something real that exists but rather a wish that something might exist — or might disappear if it now exists. Unlike the present moment, which is real and occurring, hope is speculative, an abstraction projected into the future. And by hoping ourselves into the future, we miss out on the good things — miracles, few though they might be — happening even now, despite our problems.”
― Steven Heighton, The Virtues of Disillusionment

“The dream of happiness-through-fame, i.e., limitless attention — clearly that too is a game of ghost-tag, inasmuch as fame, like money, doesn’t guarantee the contentment we naturally associate with both. (The cruel paradox here: while neither success nor wealth
can ensure happiness, failure and poverty are likely to
induce the opposite.)”
― Steven Heighton, The Virtues of Disillusionment

“DEVOURING NOVELS when you’re young — as does the protagonist of The Shadow Boxer — gives you a glimpse of the necessity of liberation, but unless you’re very lucky you don’t instantly waken. Likewise, reading Buddhist scriptures for twenty years might make you kinder and more thoughtful, but the only thing that will foment fundamental change is subjecting the insights to disciplined practice.
Knowing what’s wrong — even knowing the solution — is not enough. Besides, at twenty or thirty or forty, or, in fact, fifty, sixty, older, many cling to the hope that somehow things will still work out, that eventual success, praise, sex, friends, likes and loves will confer a final happiness. In fact, you have to suffer enough first that you finally give up that hope.”
― Steven Heighton, The Virtues of Disillusionment

“In fact, there never was even a me or you that suffered all that pain. The pain itself was real, even lethal — but the solid, unchanging self that seemed to feel it was an illusion. What’s more, the lie of that solid ego gave the pain a place to roost, a place to stick and fester and worsen . . . And maybe this is another reason radical disillusionment hurts so terribly: it means acknowledging your own death, or the death of that thing that for years you believed was you, the false self that your life-lies were protecting.”
― Steven Heighton, The Virtues of Disillusionment

“Everyone over a certain (very young) age has endured disillusionment and knows it to be an acutely painful sensation. “Sensation” is not nearly a strong enough word. We’re talking about a pain that can suffuse our very cells and rapidly metastasize into depression; a pain that seems, symptomatically, to have much in common with the knock-out body blow that a jilting, an abandonment, or other rejection can inflict. Perhaps disillusionment is a kind of jilting / rejection? It can leave us feeling we’ve been dropped by the world, existentially dumped; the cherished belief we were embracing like a lover has turned out to be a cheat, a false friend, a zero, and the pain of that epiphany is lonely and isolating.”
― Steven Heighton, The Virtues of Disillusionment

“To be disillusioned is to be Dear Johned by a spectre. There we stand, ears scalding with shame as we realize how grotesquely we’d given ourselves to the illusion that something about ourselves or the world was true.”
― Steven Heighton, The Virtues of Disillusionment

“Hope” is the next word I want to consider mathematically. We’d probably all agree, initially, that it’s a term with a positive value. Renowned Buddhist philosopher Thich Nhat Hanh, however, begs to differ. On the contrary, he says he perceives something tragic in hope.”
― Steven Heighton, The Virtues of Disillusionment

“Worst of all is discerning, over the course of many
sleepless nights, that you have not one life-lie but many — a webwork of illusions that over the years you’ve told yourself about yourself (whatever “I” and “myself” might be, or whatever they once were, if they ever were at all).”
― Steven Heighton, The Virtues of Disillusionment

“Love is the underground force that here and there drives springs to the surface of life's quotidian waste.”
― Steven Heighton, The Shadow Boxer

“The pain of waking to self-awareness might be likened to that of coming to with the most crushing hang-over of your life, but I suspect a better analogy is the shock and trauma of being born.”
― Steven Heighton, The Virtues of Disillusionment

“If we agree that “illusion” is a negative and the prefix “dis-” a kind of minus sign, then logically and by mathematical analogy “disillusion” and “disillusionment” must be positives, no? And yet in common parlance they’re anything but.”
― Steven Heighton, The Virtues of Disillusionment

“...the one small wisdom he has gained from his life is that, when flags start to wave, someone must always refuse to join in.”
― Steven Heighton

“We all accept or create illusions and cling to them. Anyone outside the walls of an ashram or Zen monastery— and, come to think of it, most of those inside as well —stumble hypnotized through their lives, lured and at the same time sedated by their illusions, mistaking figments and projections for reality.”
― Steven Heighton, The Virtues of Disillusionment

“The life-lie of Canadian niceness has, it’s safe to say, been outed as an illusion, yet even now, in the wake of the Residential Schools exposé, it seems many of us continue to believe that We the North are somehow “nicer.” We resist disillusionment so as to save face, to save the appearances, to shore up the foundations of a house of smoke and shadows. The truth hurts, as false friends — or “frenemies” — sometimes say when they turn on us and tactlessly point out our flaws. But what hurts worse than a painful truth is a lie outed, especially one we’ve been telling ourselves.”
― Steven Heighton, The Virtues of Disillusionment

“Cohen’s last album before his death, You Want It Darker, is one of his best and was rightly acclaimed as such. The passing of an illusion, it seems, can generate art as good as the illusion itself.”
― Steven Heighton, The Virtues of Disillusionment

“Disillusionment is a state of withdrawal from a long- abused substance. No wonder it hurts like hell. No wonder it can scar or kill you.”
― Steven Heighton, The Virtues of Disillusionment

“MEMO TO SELF: the best justification for emotional pain is that the path to mature consciousness runs through a gauntlet of sorrow and loss.”
― Steven Heighton, The Virtues of Disillusionment