Pure Colour

by Sheila Heti

But is that even possible—for an artist to shape their impulse into a form which is not, in the end, an art form?

The heart of the artist is a little bit hollow. The bones of the artist are a little bit hollow. The brain of the artist is a little bit hollow. But this allows them to fly.

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

Love this

And she thought, All that time, all that stupid time, I should have been with my father.

Fathers Day

Art would never leave us like a father dying. In a way, it would always remain. Artists manifested themselves in art, not the world, so humans could encounter them there, forever.

Had it been wrong of her not to understand that the sky was more valuable than a website?

But the love of her father had made her think she was great, as giant as the universe, and that other people should know it. What had she accomplished with all her ambition to prove his beliefs about her right?

What should I focus on, then? That the probability of any person being around is one in a trillion, so it’s almost a zero percent chance of you being here. But you’re going to have, you know, eight billion people, and those eight billion people have won the lottery. And the worst part is that nobody realizes that!

We will always find ourselves in a situation.

Annie knew about the dangers of going out so far that you could no longer find your way back. She saw that this was happening to Mira, so she helped her wind up the string of her story. It was a gentle winding and tying it up and handing it back to Mira, for Mira to do what she liked with it.

Are you sad to be living in the first draft—shoddily made, rushed, exuberant, malformed? No, you are proud to be strong enough to be living here now, one of God’s expendable soldiers in the first draft of the world.

Our lives are full of misery, but what about the thrill of being here together, in this terrible time, knowing that life will not be so terrible once the next draft comes?

God has put a hole in your head so things like that fall out of it. Yet you keep trying to put things like that into it! There is not a hole in your head for no reason at all. There is a hole in your head for certain things, and not for certain other things. Find the things that don’t leak out and fill your head with those ones.

But did she want to undo the past because she had lived it wrongly, or was regret just a bug in how she’d been made?

Both of them wanted the very same thing—for the other one to be living their own life—but they also wanted to be close and to be living the same one.