Pure Colour

by Sheila Heti

It is the flowers in the soul of the person who put them there that make us happy and enliven our hearts.

She was alone so she could hear herself thinking. She was alone so she could hear herself living.

It was important to know what you thought of things—what you believed the world to be, and what you thought it should be.

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

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

Seeing Annie for the first time, something in Mira recognized her. It was like their relationship already existed. It wasn’t this way with most other people. It was Annie’s apparent pre-existence, which seemed impossible to explain, which distinguished her from the rest.

With a few people in one’s life, too much happens emotionally—more than even makes sense to happen, given how little has actually occurred. Such people are deeply igniting in a way that others are not. This igniting always happens in the very first instant and it never goes away. No stupidities can destroy the igniting, so even if those two people never meet again, a connection always remains. Mira felt this way about Annie. It wasn’t that Mira had met her in some previous life. It was that she was meeting her in this one—

She doesn’t know why she spent so much of her life thinking about such trivial things, or looking at websites, when just outside her window there was a sky that was not trivial.

They don’t realize what a rare opportunity they have to observe this universe, because here’s this amazing universe, and if humans hadn’t evolved to this stage, they wouldn’t know they were living in this beautiful place.

You have love in you, but that part is extra-human, and that part is in the plants, and the animals, and the clouds, and the seas, and everything.

It’s amazing out here, near Saturn, the blackness and the rightness and patience of everything, and not having any desires.

There are so many things you can do with your body if you can let it relax and bend to the shape of the universe, which is spherical tubes that are spherical not only in one direction, such as along it, but within it at every juncture, so that you can bend your back over the sphere of Saturn’s rings, not only sideways across the ring but within the ring itself, which is spherical all the way through.

your body is not confined to a track, for instead of a track it’s the rings of Saturn. You might be asked, Do you want to experience it? And the answer is, Yes, but then you have to relax. The universe, having let you die, is not going to kill you again. It takes some time to get used to this, that you are not going to keep on dying,

Even if a daughter accepts the lessons of her father, she will turn into a creature he didn’t expect.