Steven Heighton Quotes

We were made to get along, to be together, and
it's a truth that's medically attested... Love and dance and connection strengthen every bodily system, while isolation, rage and sadness poison them with cortisol.

An Elegy, Years After Sarah"

So her ceiling a map of stars. First time we made love
late afternoon late winter, and after she slept
how her room fogged up with dusk
and paper stars she'd stuck up there in childhood
came out in strange constellations
and I missed the earth
till her room was night her breath deepening the stars
cooling down: I said come closer and her eyes
- half-open, flashing back whatever light there was - went out.

To listen to critics, pro or con, and take their words to heart is to subcontract your self-esteem to strangers. (from Workbook)

Let failure be your workshop. See it for what is is: the world walking you through a tough but necessary semester, free of tuition. (from Workbook)

I'm supportive of practical nationalism, like the kind we need in Canada to avoid being absorbed into a much larger country. The kind of nationalism I despise as destructive and infantile is really just tribalism writ large.

Boredom is the laboratory where new enthusiasms prepare themselves,

...the one small wisdom he has gained from his life is that, when flags start to wave, someone must always refuse to join in.

The idiot willingness to choose sides is what feeds the abattoir of history.

I've been a traveller, but I don't travel so much now. I'm trying to do it vicariously through my writing. I'm trying to write books that will draw readers away from their lives but send them back in a more awakened way.

I used to be more of a purist about literature. I thought, 'If it's a really propulsive story, then maybe there's something unliterary about it.'

Love ... requires that you learn to read the lover in her own language, not translate her into yours.