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kaylapages 's review for:
Alphabetical Diaries
by Sheila Heti
“A husband is a good insurance against the crazy, against the many things of the world.”
“After that, all I wanted was to play with my future children in a sun-dappled room.”
“Art is too much a tool for ambition, and not even the ambition to make something beautiful — which, as I write it, seems exhausting,too — but just the personal ambition to rise above other people.”
“By the end, people around you will be dying off, and they will be thinking about their own deaths and the deaths of their partners so entirely that they won’t have time to notice what you have accomplished, or how you managed to live such a faultless life, they’re just just going to be thinking about how their wife is dying, or how their husband has died, or about how there’s nobody in the world who will love them as much or understand them so well, while you will be sitting here all alone with your great pride over the life you have crafted, and the work you have made, and everything you did to make yourself so perfect and good.”
“Don’t forget that, although you aren’t telling a story, you must still do what stories do, which is lead the reader through an experience.”
“Greener pastures, read every day. Grow my brain and my knowledge. Grow out bangs. Grow up.”
“Hanif thinks that craft is what writers concern themselves with when they have no subject or passion by birthright.”
“How do you express both things in literature: that there is a person, and that the person is dressed up as the character?”
“I am going inside myself and I don’t want to have coffee with anyone anymore!”
“I apologized to him, and now there is just the rest of my life.”
“I asked her what she is most good at in the world and she said it was making […] and I asked what her technique was, and she said, I do it every day.”
“I will return to my book, but not with the little duster that one takes in hand when approaching ancient Egyptian tablets, but with a chainsaw and no fear.”
“If this book is any good, it will be because of a concentration of mental energy, even in times when you didn’t know where you were going.”
“It makes me feel like something is wrong with me when I don’t work on my book, which is most days.”
“On one level I’m skeptical and on another I’m lazy; skeptical about whether it will make a difference, literature, and the skepticism and the laziness will marry each other, and will probably prevent me from fulfilling my potential as a writer, but I don’t know, sometimes I think about what Gil once said, that no one wants to read the work of an A+ student.”
“Put your longing for the glamorous life into your books; you can just write things, and your books will have a better time in the minds of other people, in your absence, then you could ever have at any party.”
“What you hate most in life are the interruptions and the surprises, that is, life itself.”
“After that, all I wanted was to play with my future children in a sun-dappled room.”
“Art is too much a tool for ambition, and not even the ambition to make something beautiful — which, as I write it, seems exhausting,too — but just the personal ambition to rise above other people.”
“By the end, people around you will be dying off, and they will be thinking about their own deaths and the deaths of their partners so entirely that they won’t have time to notice what you have accomplished, or how you managed to live such a faultless life, they’re just just going to be thinking about how their wife is dying, or how their husband has died, or about how there’s nobody in the world who will love them as much or understand them so well, while you will be sitting here all alone with your great pride over the life you have crafted, and the work you have made, and everything you did to make yourself so perfect and good.”
“Don’t forget that, although you aren’t telling a story, you must still do what stories do, which is lead the reader through an experience.”
“Greener pastures, read every day. Grow my brain and my knowledge. Grow out bangs. Grow up.”
“Hanif thinks that craft is what writers concern themselves with when they have no subject or passion by birthright.”
“How do you express both things in literature: that there is a person, and that the person is dressed up as the character?”
“I am going inside myself and I don’t want to have coffee with anyone anymore!”
“I apologized to him, and now there is just the rest of my life.”
“I asked her what she is most good at in the world and she said it was making […] and I asked what her technique was, and she said, I do it every day.”
“I will return to my book, but not with the little duster that one takes in hand when approaching ancient Egyptian tablets, but with a chainsaw and no fear.”
“If this book is any good, it will be because of a concentration of mental energy, even in times when you didn’t know where you were going.”
“It makes me feel like something is wrong with me when I don’t work on my book, which is most days.”
“On one level I’m skeptical and on another I’m lazy; skeptical about whether it will make a difference, literature, and the skepticism and the laziness will marry each other, and will probably prevent me from fulfilling my potential as a writer, but I don’t know, sometimes I think about what Gil once said, that no one wants to read the work of an A+ student.”
“Put your longing for the glamorous life into your books; you can just write things, and your books will have a better time in the minds of other people, in your absence, then you could ever have at any party.”
“What you hate most in life are the interruptions and the surprises, that is, life itself.”