Heidi Julavits famous quotes

03-24-2025

I wont deny that I have a far more productive writing life without the Internet, mostly because I rekindle my ability to concentrate on one thing for a period of longer than three minutes. My curiosity is channeled inward rather than Internet-ward.
-- Heidi Julavits

#Writing #Curiosity #Three
A logic proof is: you get a starting point and an ending point, and you have to get there through all these different steps and tautologies. I approach novel writing that way. When I get to the end I have to go back and connect everything.
-- Heidi Julavits

#Writing #Way #Steps
I spend far too much time on eBay buying lamps and upholstery remnants.
-- Heidi Julavits

#Ebay #Lamps #Too Much
I obviously read and adore traditional fiction. I teach traditional fiction; I also teach all kinds of not-so-traditional fiction.
-- Heidi Julavits

#Fiction #Kind #Adore
Our cover has always been really important. For those of you who havenâ€™t seen itCharles Burns, who is a graphic artist, does four portraits, so itâ€™s split into quadrants and thereâ€™s four heads, basicallyâ€”portraits of people. Weâ€™ve actually often thought and freaked out, what if something happened to Charles Burns? Because heâ€™s so identified with the cover of our magazine, I donâ€™t know what we would do if anything happened to Charles Burns.
-- Heidi Julavits

#Artist #People #What If
I tell myself it's a virtue, my failure to sleep in my own house, or at all. I tell myself that I spend more hours than most people aware that I am alive, and that over a lifetime this adds up to more living, more aliveness. I am more alive than the rest of my family. Which is my greatest night fear. Which is why I hunt. I don't ever want to be more alive than they are.
-- Heidi Julavits

#Sleep #Night #People
I think thereâ€™s a lot of threshold weeping. Like, am I doing this? Am I really wearing this out in the world? My daughter is very much like that. She will put clothes on and her clothes just make her beside herself. They make her so sad sometimes. And you do realize you feel betrayed sometimes by your own clothing. You put something on that usually protects you and makes you OK, and sometimes youâ€™re just not fit for the world and even your best pants canâ€™t overcome that feeling for you.
-- Heidi Julavits

#Daughter #Thinking #Clothes
I calmed myself by walking into my nearby bookstore and marveling at all the books other people had written. So many people had finished and published novels; it couldnâ€™t be so hard, right?
-- Heidi Julavits

#Book #People #Marveling
A white girl disappears from a white prep school in a white suburb. Nobody knows what happened to her. The overall whiteness of the world is threatened. This must be resolved by whatever means possible.
-- Heidi Julavits

#Girl #School #Mean
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

#Girl #Mother #Running
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

#Stupidity #Live In The Moment #Dull
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

#Humorous #Heart #Imagination
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

#Children #Smart #People
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

#Childhood #What If #Taught

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