Heidi Julavits > Quotes

“I am simply looking for a companion with whom to spend my days, a companion who will cherish as much as I the stupidity of living in the moment, and spend every dull, amazing second with me.”
― Heidi Julavits, The Effect of Living Backwards

“I can't even tell you what else I imagined. I can only humiliate myself to such a degree; at a certain point it becomes humorous, and this story is not meant to be humorous. This story is meant to winch your ribs open and tamper with your heart. This story is meant to make you realize that your chances of happiness in this world are terribly slim if you lack a fine imagination.”
― Heidi Julavits, The Effect of Living Backwards

“I've always said that you were too smart to have a profession. Smart people are hopeless in the face of anything actual. They are terrible cooks. They cannot dress themselves. They are children who need guidance and protecting.”
― Heidi Julavits, The Effect of Living Backwards

“We're taught to find the antecedents to our adult failures in childhood traumas, and so we spend our lives looking bacwards and pointing fingers, rather than bucking up and forging ahead. But what if your childhood was all a big misunderstanding? An elaborate ruse? What does that say about failure? Better yet, what does that say about potential?”
― Heidi Julavits, The Effect of Living Backwards

“I take you for a girl who's eager to grow unstable at the first indication that things can come back to haunt a person, even after she has given them up for dead.”
― Heidi Julavits, The Effect of Living Backwards

“He was uninterested in art, politics, culture, people. While his brain burrowed through rock toward a very specific knowledge goal, mine preferred to warren the air; his brain operated a drill bit while mine launched a thousand aimless kites that tangled strings or bounced along the invisible currents, disconnected and alone. Cognitively, we were the gravitational negatives of each other. Sometimes I wished I had his brain. But only sometimes. He suffered due to his specialized excesses; he just suffered differently from me.”
― Heidi Julavits, The Vanishers

“When I write, I am trying through the movement of my fingers to reach my head. I’m trying to build a word ladder up to my brain.”
― Heidi Julavits, The Folded Clock: A Diary

“My behavior makes perfect sense to me.”
― Heidi Julavits, The Folded Clock: A Diary

“In the midst of such uncertainty, I cling not to what I know, but what I feel.”
― Heidi Julavits, The Folded Clock: A Diary

“The sensation felt like spinning too fast on a merry-go-round. Each fraction of a second her eyes focused on a new face in a crowd. Within seconds the face was gone, whisked to a blur, replaced by another face that would just as soon be lost.”
― Heidi Julavits

“Or perhaps it was the crying woman's mention of the unread library books, because truly there was nothing sadder, except a gift that a person has hand made for you, a scarf or a poncho, that, try as you might, you cannot ever see your way into wearing. This is when the cold indifference of the world envelops you, and makes you feel invigorated by emotion but also acutely alone.”
― Heidi Julavits, The Vanishers

“At a certain point, it seems more polite to just become the person people assume you to be.”
― Heidi Julavits, The Folded Clock: A Diary

“This is why she doesn’t put much stock in so-called secrets, or the meaningfulness of untold recollections that become, in their airtight echo chambers, the supposed stuff of secrets. They are only a way to become retrospectively enraged at someone else so that your own adult weaknesses can be tidily excused.”
― Heidi Julavits

“... but as with so may diagnoses it is, in the end, the symptoms that matter, not the cause, because this is what being alive means, this is what being a person means, to be sickened by an illness known as you.”
― Heidi Julavits, The Vanishers

“Worrying about originality is like worrying about the best place to hang your wall phone.”
― Heidi Julavits, The Folded Clock: A Diary

“But girls . . . girls, mishandled, are a menace.”
― Heidi Julavits

“Crushes thrive in small spaces. Humans must be programmed to respond positively when faced with a small sampling of other humans in, say, caves. You're stuck in a cave with three other people - all mankind, presumably, was hidden away in such tiny groups during the winters until the thaw - and so, in order for the species to thrive, you must be biologically compelled to fuck at least one person in your cave, despite the fact that, when surrounded by a plenitude of Neanderthals at the Neanderthal summer barbecue, none of them struck your fancy. Without the element of choice, and in conjunction with captivity, you find love, or at least you find lust.”
― Heidi Julavits, The Folded Clock: A Diary

“Like Semmering Academy, the Grove School was a Gothic pile of bricks run by 1950s-era chalk drones, which maintained its cultural viability by perpetuating a weirdly seductive anxiety throughout its community. Mary herself was a victim of the seduction; despite the trying and repetitive emotional requirements of her job, she remained eternally fascinated by the wicker-thin girls and their wicker-thin mothers, all of them favoring dark wool skirts and macintoshes and unreadably far-away expressions; if she squinted, they could have emerged intact from any of the last seven decades.”
― Heidi Julavits, The Uses of Enchantment

“I am a jack-of-all-trades. I edit and teach and at times desire to be a clothing designer or an artist (one who doesn't draw or paint or sew) and I write everything but poetry and I am a mother and a social maniac and a misanthrope and a burgeoning self-help guru and a girl who wants to look pretty and a girl who wants to look sexy and a girl who wants to look girly and a woman in her middle forties who wishes not to look like anything at all, who wishes sometimes to vanish.”
― Heidi Julavits, The Folded Clock: A Diary

“We are multiple beings having a dubious experience”
― Heidi Julavits, The Effect of Living Backwards

“To be melancholy is to be self-haunted, and among the many reasons this is an unsatisfactory explanation for living inside a jam jar inside an aquarium, foremost among them is that there are no good stories to tell of your bleak time in a beautiful place, and no specter to blame for the fact that happiness, though it should have been inescapable, evaded you.”
― Heidi Julavits, The Folded Clock: A Diary

“Set a good example. Want to fuck yourself so that others want to fuck you too.”
― Heidi Julavits, The Folded Clock: A Diary

“I wanted to escape my head because my head is so stupid these days. I wanted to be inside someone else's head.”
― Heidi Julavits, The Folded Clock: A Diary

“I used to be as scared of public speaking as I was of sharks. Every time I teach I get an endorphin high off the fact that I did not have a panic attack. I teach and swim in order to measure my improvement as a human. I am no longer terrified of quite so many things.”
― Heidi Julavits, The Folded Clock: A Diary

“I reread books to measure my degree of difference from myself.”
― Heidi Julavits, The Folded Clock: A Diary

“No girl I knew, in other words, had babies, but more than a few had had abortions. I'd attended two abortions before my own. I'd been invited along to do the driving, and hold the hands, and sit afterward in the bars and fetch the drinks. The boyfriends, though informed of our activities, were never present. Abortions are women's work, I guess.”
― Heidi Julavits, The Folded Clock: A Diary

“But my illness, even in its absence, made it hard for me to enjoy life. Good health means being unaware of one’s health. I was not yet unaware.”
― Heidi Julavits, The Vanishers

“I enjoy a misogynist so long as they have a wicked sense of humor and know, on some level, that they’re pigs. This is why I enjoy Philip Roth but not Saul Bellow or James Salter.”
― Heidi Julavits, The Folded Clock: A Diary

“My friend did not want her suspicion—which sustained the possibility that her husband both was and was not having an affair—to disappear by exposing it.”
― Heidi Julavits, The Folded Clock: A Diary

“I stood on the street corner. I thought about chasing after her, but she was churning swiftly through the neighborhood -- she was already almost a block away -- so instead I entered a coffee shop. This is why I was on the street. I was going to a coffee shop, and I was buying a coffee, and then I was walking to class, and then I would teach, and then during office hours I would reassure the students who needed reassuring, and I would be tough on the students who could take it, and if someone cried in my office for reasons unrelated but maybe sort of related to the imperfect short story they'd written, I would tell them that fiction makes you cry, the fiction you read though more often it's the shitty fiction you write that makes you cry, and I would also be thinking, You poor person, you have no idea what awaits you. A life awaits you, like a serious fucking life. This is what I would want to say. And then I would go home to my serious fucking life, and it would be so ridiculously unserious; it would involve soup spills and dirty dishes and lengthy logic proofs meant to coerce tired, inarticulate people to bed, and I would think how lucky I was to have this unserious life, i.e., to be forced to do somewhat or even thoroughly banal things every day. Because what awaits you if you don't? What kind of life awaits you then? A life where you don't calmly think, as you're scraping up the crystallized juice rings before showering before getting dressed before buying coffee before teaching class before reassuring people their hard lives would only get harder, Fuck this whole existence. You're running down the street and you're screaming at a university to which you no longer belong, you're wearing a sweatshirt not even branded with the insignia of the university on which you blame your breakdown, the university to which you are no longer affiliated, because you are so deeply unaffiliated that you are barely even affiliated with your own face.”
― Heidi Julavits, The Folded Clock: A Diary