Zoë Heller > Quotes

“Being alone is not the most awful thing in the world. You visit your museums and cultivate your interests and remind yourself how lucky you are not to be one of those spindly Sudanese children with flies beading their mouths. You make out To Do lists - reorganise linen cupboard, learn two sonnets. You dole out little treats to yourself - slices of ice-cream cake, concerts at Wigmore Hall. And then, every once in a while, you wake up and gaze out of the window at another bloody daybreak, and think, I cannot do this anymore. I cannot pull myself together again and spend the next fifteen hours of wakefulness fending off the fact of my own misery.

People like Sheba think that they know what it's like to be lonely. They cast their minds back to the time they broke up with a boyfriend in 1975 and endured a whole month before meeting someone new. Or the week they spent in a Bavarian steel town when they were fifteen years old, visiting their greasy-haired German pen pal and discovering that her hand-writing was the best thing about her. But about the drip drip of long-haul, no-end-in-sight solitude, they know nothing. They don't know what it is to construct an entire weekend around a visit to the laundrette. Or to sit in a darkened flat on Halloween night, because you can't bear to expose your bleak evening to a crowd of jeering trick-or-treaters. Or to have the librarian smile pityingly and say, ‘Goodness, you're a quick reader!’ when you bring back seven books, read from cover to cover, a week after taking them out. They don't know what it is to be so chronically untouched that the accidental brush of a bus conductor's hand on your shoulder sends a jolt of longing straight to your groin. I have sat on park benches and trains and schoolroom chairs, feeling the great store of unused, objectless love sitting in my belly like a stone until I was sure I would cry out and fall, flailing, to the ground. About all of this, Sheba and her like have no clue.”
― Zoë Heller, What Was She Thinking? [Notes on a Scandal]

“There are certain people in whom you can detect the seeds of madness - seeds that have remained dormant only because the people in question have lived relatively comfortable, middle class lives. They function perfectly well in the world, but you can imagine, given a nasty parent, or a prolonged bout of unemployment, how their potential for craziness might have been realized.”
― Zoe Heller, What Was She Thinking? [Notes on a Scandal]

“...what is romance, but a mutual pact of delusion? When the pact ends, there's nothing left.”
― Zoe Heller, What Was She Thinking? [Notes on a Scandal]

“But about the drip drip of long-haul, no-end-in-sight solitude, they know nothing. They don't know what it is to construct an entire weekend around a visit to the laundrette. Or to sit in a darkened flat on Halloween night, because you can't bear to expose your bleak evening to a crowd of jeering trick-or-treaters. Or to have the librarian smile pityingly and say, ‘Goodness, you're a quick reader!’ when you bring back seven books, read from cover to cover, a week after taking them out. They don't know what it is to be so chronically untouched that the accidental brush of a bus conductor's hand on your shoulder sends a jolt of longing straight to your groin.”
― Zoe Heller, What Was She Thinking? Notes on a Scandal

“We are bound by the secrets we share.”
― Zoe Heller, What Was She Thinking? [Notes on a Scandal]

“Always mind the distance between your dreams and your reality.”
― Zoe Heller, Notes on a Scandal

“It's similar to the way you feel cuddling an infant or a kitten, when you want to squeeze it so hard you'd kill it...”
― Zoë Heller, What Was She Thinking? [Notes on a Scandal]

“When you live alone, your furnishings, your possessions, are always confronting you with the thinness of your existence.”
― Zoe Heller, Notes on a Scandal: What Was She Thinking?

“All my life I have been the sort of person in whom people confide. And all my life I have been flattered by this role - grateful for the frisson of importance that comes with receiving important information. In recent years, however, I have noticed that my gratification is becoming diluted by a certain weary indignation. They tell me because they regard me as safe. All of them, they make their disclosures to me in the same spirit that they might tell a castrato or a priest - with a sense that I am so outside the loop, so remote from the doings of the great world, as to be defused of any possible threat. The number of secrets I receive is in inverse proportion to the number of secrets anyone expects me to have of my own. And this is the real source of my dismay. Being told secrets is not - never has been - a sign that I belong or that I matter. It is quite the opposite: confirmation of my irrelevance.”
― Zoë Heller, What Was She Thinking? [Notes on a Scandal]

“...elegance loses its power in the presence of the properly stupid...”
― Zoë Heller

“It's always a disappointing business confronting my own reflection. My body isn't bad. It's a perfectly nice, serviceable body. It's just that the external me- the study, lightly wrinkled, handbagged me- does so little credit to the stuff that's inside.”
― Zoë Heller, What Was She Thinking? [Notes on a Scandal]

“I'm a child in that respect: able to live, physically speaking, on a crumb of anticipation for weeks at a time, but always in danger of crushing the waited-for event with the freight of my excessive hope.”
― Zoë Heller, What Was She Thinking? [Notes on a Scandal]

“Things that are truly innocent don’t need to be labelled as such.”
― Zoë Heller, What Was She Thinking? [Notes on a Scandal]

“In the end, I suspect, being female will do nothing for Sheba, except deny her the grandeur of genuine villainy.”
― Zoë Heller, What Was She Thinking? [Notes on a Scandal]

“The number of secrets I receive is in inverse proportion to the number of secrets anyone expects me to have of my own. And this is the real source of my dismay. Being told secrets is not - never has been - a sign that I belong or that I matter. It is quite the opposite: confirmation of my irrelevance.”
― Zoë Heller, What Was She Thinking? [Notes on a Scandal]

“I mean, what is romance, but a mutual pact of delusion? When the pact ends, there's nothing left.”
― Zoë Heller, What Was She Thinking? [Notes on a Scandal]

“[...]One pretends that manners are the formalisation of basic kindness and consideration, but a great deal of the time they're simply aesthetics dressed up as moral principles, aren't they?”
― Zoë Heller, What Was She Thinking? [Notes on a Scandal]

“I cannot do this anymore. I cannot pull myself together again and spend the next fifteen hours of wakefulness fending off the fact of my own misery.”
― Zoë Heller, What Was She Thinking?: Notes on a Scandal

“There it was again - the perverse refusal to acknowledge my hostility. She seemed to me like some magical lake in a fairy tale: nothing could disturb the mirror-calm of her surface. My snide comments and bitter jokes disappeared soundlessly into her depths, leaving not so much as a ripple.”
― Zoë Heller, What Was She Thinking? [Notes on a Scandal]

“It is always difficult, the transition from noisy refusal to humble acceptance.”
― Zoë Heller, What Was She Thinking? [Notes on a Scandal]

“Meir, let me ask you something,” I said after a while.
“Sure.”
“Do you think I’m a bad person?”
“Only God knows that for sure, Willy.”
“So you don’t have an opinion at all?”
“Not one that really matters.”
“Okay, let me ask you something else. If the Polish peasant who hid Jews from the Nazis is a hero, what is the Polish peasant who turned the Jews away? Is he a coward?”
Meir smiled, “Of course.”
“Really? A coward? A bad man?”
“A coward isn’t a bad man, necessarily. You can’t know if you’re a bad man until you die.”
“You’ve got to wait until you hear god’s decision?”
“Well, yes, that’s true. But I meant something else. Only when you die do you run out of chances to be good. Until then, there is always the possibility of turning yourself around.”
― Zoe Heller, Everything You Know

“Talking to him is rather like talking to a school play.”
― Zoë Heller, What Was She Thinking? [Notes on a Scandal]

“I could feel Monika nudging me furiously at this point, but I refused to look at her. I wasn’t feeling particularly reverent about my mother’s deadness, or about the vicar, but I do despise that ghastly, ‘You’ve got to laugh, haven’t you?’ approach to religious occasions. As a young man, I often goaded my believing friends with crudely logical questions about God. But as the years have passed, I have found myself hankering more and more for a little cosy voodoo in my life. Increasingly, I regard my atheism as a regrettable limitation. It seems to me that my lack of faith is not, as I once thought, a triumph of the rational mind, but rather, a failure of the imagination - an inability to tolerate mystery: a species, in fact, of neurosis. There is no chance of my being converted, of course - it is far too late for that. But I wish it wasn’t.”
― Zoe Heller, Everything You Know

“I don't write books for people to be friends with the characters. If you want to find friends, go to a cocktail party.”
― Zoë Heller

“He had made a fairly unambiguous pass at her, as she was getting out of the cab. But event that had come to nothing. Sheba said that she had sensed something resentful about him, as if he begrudged her for having the power to attract him.”
― Zoë Heller

“The conclusion of Dowell's narrative offers not a resolution, so much as a plangent confirmation of complexities. While Ford would certainly have agreed with Dowell that it is a novelist's business to make a reader 'see things clearly', his interest in clarity had little to do with simplicity. There is no 'getting to the bottom of things', no triumphant answers to the epistemological muddle offered in this beautiful, bleak story - only a finer appreciation of that confusion. We may remove the scales from our eyes, Ford suggests, but only the better to appreciate the glass through which we see darkly.”
― Zoë Heller, The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion

“If everybody was so reverent of the institute of marriage, how did all the adultery get committed?”
― Zoë Heller, What Was She Thinking? [Notes on a Scandal]

“It seems to me that my lack of faith is not, as I once thought, a triumph of the rational mind, but rather a failure of the imagination - an inability to tolerate mistery.”
― Zoë Heller, Everything You Know

“If this was cynical, then we must allow that all courtship is cynical.”
― Zoë Heller, What Was She Thinking? [Notes on a Scandal]

“How had she ended up like this, imprisoned in the role of harridan? Once upon a time, her brash manner had been a mere posture - a convenient and amusing way for an insecure teenage bride, newly arrived in America, to disguise her crippling shyness. People had actually enjoyed her vituperation back then, encouraged it and celebrated it. She had carved out a minor distinction for herself as a 'character': the cute little English girl with the chutzpah and the longshoreman's mouth. 'Get Audrey in here,' they used to cry whenever someone was being an ass. 'Audrey'll take him down a peg or two.'

But somewhere along the way, when she hadn't been paying attention, her temper had ceased to be a beguiling party at that could be switched on and off at will. It had begun to express authentic resentments: boredom with motherhood, fury at her husband's philandering, despair at the pettiness of her domestic fate. She hadn't noticed the change at first. Like an old lady who persists in wearing the Jungle Red lipstick of her glory days, she had gone on for a long time, fondly believing that the stratagems of her youth were just as appealing as they had ever been. By the time she woke up and discovered that people had taken to making faces at her behind her back - that she was no longer a sexy young woman with a charmingly short fuse but a middle-aged termagant - it was too late. Her anger had become a part of her. It was a knotted thicket in her gut, too dense to be cut down and too deeply entrenched in the loamy soil of her disappointments to be uprooted.”
― Zoë Heller, The Believers