Heidi Julavits Quotes

I'm not going to lie, there are more interesting ways to spend your time than answering questions about yourself. But if there were no questions to ask me, I might have a beef with that.

A great interpreter of life ought not himself to need interpretation.

The more I talk about things, the more I understand myself.

I aim to be translucent, so you don't notice the words, just their meaning. I haven't much insight into people's motivations.

I know what I'm trying to say, so I'm always open to learning how to say it.

You have days where you're trying to be your best, and you say something, and you see it being written in three different places and in a way that you didn't mean for it to be interpreted. But you just try to do your best. You kind of just have to let everything else roll off your back.

I don't like being told what you're good at. I'd rather hear what I didn't do.

Of course I am doing a good job, but you can always improve, and I just leave it up to people outside, around me or whatever, to judge on that.

I'm interested in how we understand ourselves in our relatioships and how we define ourselves.

It is, I fear, but a vain show of fulfilling the heathen precept, ''Know thyself,'' and too often leads to a self- estimate which will subsist in the absence of that fruit by which alone the quality of the tree is made evident.

Some people think humility is thinking lowly of yourself. Some people think it's not thinking about yourself. But, to me, the best definition of humility is radical self-awareness from a distance, seeing themselves from a distance and saying, what's my problem?

I don't care about people kissing my ass or telling me how great I am. I don't really give a damn. I read the bad stuff a whole lot more than I read the good stuff. I read that because there are always going to be critics who are going to say how good you aren't.

when asked, most folks will gladly tell us about ourselves, who we are, what we're feeling, and where we should be heading. And if we don't honor ourselves by listening to our lives, we'll believe them.

To know yourself you have only to set down a true statement of those that ever loved or hated you.

I think I'm one of those people that needed to be seen by someone else to see myself. But then on the other hand, the way I do my work, I always try to only completely focus on my work, so when I do my work I'm only interested in my character. So I don't have an idea of what it means for my career. So this is why I don't feel like I need to be discovered, because I feel like even without being discovered, I will be fine.

There was a time when I was way too reliant upon other people's opinions and perspective of me. And I guess over time came to see how unhealthy that was. I mean it's almost like a sign of mental illness to base your self-worth on the opinions of complete strangers.

If you don't look at yourself and evaluate it, you instead see how the world's reacting to it.

I think I'm perfectly reasonable.

I don't know if I'm more confident than ever before, because I definitely had confidence when I was starting out. Maybe I have less confidence now that I did then.

I believe that everyone has to construct a mental model of what they are and where they came from and why they are as they are, and the word soul in each person is the name for that particular mish-mash of those fully formed ideas of one's nature.

I think I'm pretty self-aware.

The more you can be self-aware and honest about yourself, the more you can cultivate that in other people.

I don't think my life itself is very interesting.

Rod Carew told me once that for those that know you, no explanation is necessary, and for those that don't know you, none is possible. That's the philosophy I live by.

Really, at the end of the day, the only thing you can control is yourself; the only person you can truly educate is yourself. You have to redefine what beauty is to you so you can't be affected by what people are saying.