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Heidi Julavits QUOTES

Heidi Julavits QUOTES

1 " 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

2 " 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

3 " ... 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

4 " Women are responsible for the people in the family having pants. "

― Heidi Julavits , The Folded Clock: A Diary

5 " 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

6 " 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

7 " 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

8 " 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

9 " 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

10 " 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

11 " 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

12 " 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

13 " 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

14 " 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

15 " My behavior makes perfect sense to me. "

― Heidi Julavits , The Folded Clock: A Diary

16 " 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

17 " In the midst of such uncertainty, I cling not to what I know, but what I feel. "

― Heidi Julavits , The Folded Clock: A Diary

18 " But girls . . . girls, mishandled, are a menace. "

― Heidi Julavits

19 " 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

20 " Set a good example. Want to fuck yourself so that others want to fuck you too. "

― Heidi Julavits , The Folded Clock: A Diary