Heidi Julavits Quotes

Building worlds is not enough for the deeper urging mind; but a loving heart sates the striving spirit.

And why is it, thought Lara, that my fate is to see everything and take it all so much to heart?

Creativity has got to start with humanity and when you're a human being, you feel, you suffer. You're gay, you're sick, you're nervous or whatever.

We seek an enlargement of our being. We want to be more than ourselves . . . We want to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as with our own . . . We demand windows.

What's often in your heart is the hardest to reach.

People tell me it's a sin, to know and feel too much within.

I really believe one of the jobs of a writer is to stretch as far as you can into other voices.

I Know, I Alone I know, I alone How much it hurts, this heart With no faith nor law Nor melody nor thought. Only I, only I And none of this can I say Because feeling is like the sky - Seen, nothing in it to see.

That is the mystery about writing: it comes out of afflictions, out of the gouged times, when the heart is cut open.

You need contrast and conflict in order to tell a story. Stories need to have dark and light, turmoil, all those things. But that does not mean the filmmaker has to suffer in order to show the suffering. Stories should have the suffering, not the people.

Personal life becomes paler as the imaginative life becomes richer.

Amid my list of blessings infinite, stands this the foremost, "that my heart has bled."

Happy children should not try to be artists. You have to be born with a broken heart and a sense of loneliness inside. I never had a happy moment as a child myself.

I carried Rudy softly through the broken street...with him I tried a little harder at comforting. I watched the contents of his soul for a moment and saw a black-painted boy calling the name Jesse Owens as he ran through an imaginary tape. I saw him hip-deep in some icy water, chasing a book, and I saw a boy lying in bed, imagining how a kiss would taste from his glorious next-door neighbor. He does something to me, that boy. Every time. It's his only detriment. He steps on my heart. He makes me cry.

The only question that nobody ever asks is: What breaks your heart? I think that should be asked of all "artists."... So, what breaks your heart?

When I set out to write, I want to write something that will rip your heart out.

I am talking about poetry. It's like that line from [John] Yeats: I go back to "where all the ladders start/ In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart."

I want to write, but more than that, I want to bring out all kinds of things that lie buried deep in my heart.

The greatest poets are those with memories so great that they extend beyond their strongest experiences to their minutest observations of people and things far outside their own self-centeredness.

The artists we love, they put their fingerprint on your imagination, and on your heart and your soul.

Often it is just lack of imagination that keeps a man from suffering very much.

I've been really fortunate where I've made stuff that connects to people on a positive level, and that makes me feel really good, but I can't feel comfortable in dictating what they're supposed to feel out of it, nor am I a professional in something where I can really help people any farther than creating the things that I make to help myself.

I'm very happy by myself - I'm lucky in that way - if I've got enough to read and something to write about and a bit of alcohol for me to add an edge, not to dull it.

What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music.... And people flock around the poet and say: 'Sing again soon' - that is, 'May new sufferings torment your soul but your lips be fashioned as before, for the cry would only frighten us, but the music, that is blissful.