Sheila Heti

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

Life is not a harvest. Just because you have an apple doesn__ 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.

If now in some ways I drink too much, it__ not that I lack a reverence for the world.

Women__ fiction_ doesn__ sound like anything but a slur to my ears.

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.