To be melancholy is to be self-haunted, and among the many reasons this is an unsatisfactory explanation for living inside a jam jar inside an aquarium, foremost among them is that there are no good stories to tell of your bleak time in a beautiful place, and no specter to blame for the fact that happiness, though it should have been inescapable, evaded you.

— Heidi Julavits

Heidi Julavits Quotes

There are some writers who are done when they finish a draft because they’ve thought it through beforehand. Whereas I’ll finish a first draft and I’m nowhere near done.

— Heidi Julavits

I don’t usually read my reviews. I’ve noticed older reviewers are much more bothered by the plot complications. Younger reviews don’t seem to be bothered by the complications at all.

— Heidi Julavits

Every once in a while when I get a migraine, I like to think, “Who hates me today?”

— Heidi Julavits

It’s fascinating to imagine two successful writers in one house. But when you think about it, it isn’t very unusual. In fact, so many writers have writer spouses.

— Heidi Julavits

As a writer, you want to go somewhere else sometimes. You want to vary the terrain that you’re exploring.

— Heidi Julavits

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

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

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

— Heidi Julavits

My behavior makes perfect sense to me.

— Heidi Julavits

I used to be as scared of public speaking as I was of sharks. Every time I teach I get an endorphin high off the fact that I did not have a panic attack. I teach and swim in order to measure my improvement as a human. I am no longer terrified of quite so many things.

— Heidi Julavits

To be melancholy is to be self-haunted, and among the many reasons this is an unsatisfactory explanation for living inside a jam jar inside an aquarium, foremost among them is that there are no good stories to tell of your bleak time in a beautiful place, and no specter to blame for the fact that happiness, though it should have been inescapable, evaded you.

— Heidi Julavits

At a certain point, it seems more polite to just become the person people assume you to be.

— Heidi Julavits

My friend did not want her suspicion – which sustained the possibility that her husband both was and was not having an affair – to disappear by exposing it.

— Heidi Julavits

Worrying about originality is like worrying about the best place to hang your wall phone.

— Heidi Julavits

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

— Heidi Julavits

I wanted to escape my head because my head is so stupid these days. I wanted to be inside someone else’s head.

— Heidi Julavits

Yet when this day has ended my child will be older and I will be nearer to dead. Why should I wish for this to happen any sooner than it already will?

— Heidi Julavits

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

No girl I knew, in other words, had babies, but more than a few had had abortions. I’d attended two abortions before my own. I’d been invited along to do the driving, and hold the hands, and sit afterward in the bars and fetch the drinks. The boyfriends, though informed of our activities, were never present. Abortions are women’s work, I guess.

— Heidi Julavits

I reread books to measure my degree of difference from myself.

— Heidi Julavits
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