How Should a Person Be?: A Novel from Life

by Sheila Heti

They like me for who I am, and I would rather be liked for who I appear to be, and for who I appear to be, to be who I am.

Her first feeling every morning was shame about all the things wrong in the world that she wasn’t trying to fix.

And if what you’re afraid of is to take a wrong step at any moment in any direction, that can be limiting. It’s good for an artist to try things. It’s good for an artist to be ridiculous.

“The only thing I ever understood is that everyone should make the big mistakes.”

Commitment looked so beautiful to me, like everything I wanted to be: consistent, wise, loving, and true.

We don’t know the effects we have on each other, but we have them.

A fear can feel like a premonition,

I felt like I was the tin man, the lion, and the scarecrow in one: I could not feel my heart, I had no courage, I could not use my brain.

Beauty is balance—yes!

Most people live their entire lives with their clothes on, and even if they wanted to, couldn’t take them off. Then there are those who cannot put them on. They are the ones who live their lives not just as people but as examples of people. They are destined to expose every part of themselves, so the rest of us can know what it means to be a human.

But life isn’t only where things are exciting; it’s where things feel hard and stagnant, too.

In their quest for a life without failure, suffering, or doubt, that is what they achieve: a life empty of all those things that make a human life meaningful.

The answer for them is to build on what they have begun and not abandon their plans as soon as things start getting difficult. They must work—without escaping into fantasies about being the person who worked.

There’s so much beauty in this world that it’s hard to begin. There are no words with which to express my gratitude at having been given this one chance to live

May the Lord have mercy on me for I am a fucking idiot. But I live in a culture of fucking idiots. I cannot be saved if not everyone is saved. If everyone around me talks nothing but shit, how can I hold myself aloof? My fate is not separate from everyone’s fate. If one man or one woman can stand up and call themselfs saved, that means we all are. And I know I’m not, so no one is.

People say there is no direction to evolution—upward to any height; that the proper metaphor is the outward webbing of a bush, not the striving of a tree toward the heavens.

I sometimes feel pretty paralyzed by my own feelings of empathy. And it’s still such a problem—shame. Maybe what I want in my life is to cut out a bit of the empathy and a bit of the shame.

Andy Warhol: Everybody’s sense of beauty is different from everybody else’s.

“though it’s not like we have zillions of dollars.” As we walked off, Margaux said, “Sure, she has so much money that she has to make up an amount of money that doesn’t exist to say how much money she doesn’t have.”

I just wish that all the people I liked were either my best friends or total strangers. As they are, of course, but …

In my mind, we were making ourselves happy. I had no idea anyone was looking at us.

“RENUNCIATION: Voluntary retreat brings good fortune to the superior man, and downfall to the inferior man.”

I knew that if I said a single word, I would burst into tears, as I always did, always had, my entire life, whenever anything difficult had to be discussed. It always was too scary; a threat I had felt since childhood that at any moment a relationship might disappear with a poof because of something little I had done or said.

“I remember being told in kindergarten not to talk too much,” I told him. “My teacher called me a chatterbox.” “Wow,” Ryan said. “I don’t have any traumatic stories like that.”

Just to do good work … to have potential … to be recognized in your field among other people, as though you’re progressing somewhere collectively, rather than competing.

And hadn’t I always gone into the world making everyone and everything a lesson in how I should be?

the point of life was not to avoid suffering—that every choice involved suffering