Sheila Heti

It is only when you get older that everyone makes you feel bad about being alone, or implies that spending time with other people is somehow better, because it proves you to be likeable.

But being unlikeable wasn’t the reason she was alone. She was alone so she could hear herself thinking. She was alone so she could hear herself living.

What do humans go to art for, but to locate within themselves that inward-turning eye, which breathes significance into all of existence—for what is art but the act of infusing matter with the breath of God?

There is no compass in his soul, so his vision becomes chaotic.

At least God had given the sunrise—to those of us who lived on a cliff.

At least he had given us a bit of love—if not enough to see us through to the end of our lives. Here in the first draft of existence, we crafted our own second drafts—stories and books and movies and plays—polishing our stones to show God and each other what we wanted the next draft to be, comforting ourselves with our visions. On good days, we acknowledged that God had done pretty well: he had given us life, and had filled in most of the blanks of existence, except for the blank in the heart.

Pretending can get you part of the way, but it never gets you far enough.

But how does she know if she has been changed, or if she just so much wants to be changed that since it happened, she has been pretending?

while he, who had always defied convention, had come back to life to show her that it was just social norms that kept other people in their graves.

She had thought that when someone died, it would be like they went into a different room. She had not known that life itself transformed into a different room, and trapped you in it without them.

Annie had realized it was better to look at them than to have them, which is true of some things in this world.