Sheila Heti

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.

Hate seemed to spring from the deepest core of our beings. Years later, all you had to do was peep through a peephole and there it was for anyone to see—a whole world of vitriol, entirely without end. It seemed that rage was what we were made of.

And why not? Happiness was not meant to be ours. The love we imagined would never be ours. Work that could occupy our hearts and minds forever—this also was not meant to be ours. We would never make the money we hoped we would make. Nothing would be as we hoped it would be, here in the first draft of existence. People were finally beginning to catch on. Our rage made perfect sense.

Hate seemed to spring from the deepest core of our beings. Years later, all you had to do was peep through a peephole and there it was for anyone to see—a whole world of vitriol, entirely without end. It seemed that rage was what we were made of.

And why not? Happiness was not meant to be ours. The love we imagined would never be ours. Work that could occupy our hearts and minds forever—this also was not meant to be ours. We would never make the money we hoped we would make. Nothing would be as we hoped it would be, here in the first draft of existence. People were finally beginning to catch on. Our rage made perfect sense.

. Some people experienced a delightful sort of rest in becoming very small, very inferior, and very irrelevant, in the face of such chaos and change.

For art is not made for living bodies—it is made for the cold, eternal soul.

There is no point in loving something that is not a bit within reach.

But she didn’t think of herself as a person back then. She didn’t think of herself as someone who another person could see, evaluate, and finally judge.

Your friends were simply who was around. It didn’t occur to anyone that it could be another way. If you liked your friends, that was okay. If you didn’t like your friends, that was okay, too.

And she loved her meagre little existence, which was entirely her own.

What of the strength of our connections with certain people, and the weakness of our connections with certain other ones?