Siri Hustvedt Quotes

Every painting is always two paintings: The one you see, and the one you remember.

A book is a collaboration between the one who reads and what is read and, at its best, that coming together is a love story like any other.

There is no future without a past, because what is to be cannot be imagined except as a form of repetition.

That is the strangeness of language: it crosses the boundaries of the body, is at once inside and outside, and it sometimes happens that we don't notice the threshold has been crossed.

Dreams are stories made by and for the dreamer, and each dreamer has his own folds to open and knots to untie.

Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.

I've always thought of wholeness and integration as necessary myths. We're gragmented beings who cement ourselves together, but there are always cracks. Living with the cracks is part of being, well, reasonably healthy.

Pain is always emotional. Fear and depression keep constant company with chronic hurting.

Widowers marry again because it makes their lives easier. Widows often don't, because it makes their lives harder. [p. 61]

Every sickness has an alien quality, a feeling of invasion and loss of control that is evident in the language we use about it.

Reading is a private pursuit; one that takes place behind closed doors.

The faculty of memory cannot be separated from the imagination. They go hand in hand. To one degree or another, we all invent our personal pasts. And for most of us those pasts are built from emotionally colored memories.

I will turn human anatomy into roses and stars and sea. I will dissect the beloveds body in metaphor.

No matter how brilliant or accomplished they are, there is something emasculating for men in being pitted against a woman. It is even more true in creative fields already considered to be "squishy" and feminine, and it's a big problem because great women have been left off the record.

Memory changes as a person matures.

I remember thinking how easy it is to speak in clichés, to steal a line from pulp fiction and let it fall. We can only hover around the inexpressible with our words anyway, and there is comfort in saying what we have heard before.

Ture stories can't be told forward, only backward. We invent them from the vantage point of an ever-changing present and tell ourselves how they unfolded.

Correlation is not cause, it is just a 'music of chance'.

Bedtime rituals for children ease the way to the elsewhere of slumber - teeth brushing and pajamas, the voice of a parent reading, the feel and smell of the old blanket or toy, the nightlight glowing in a corner.

Memory offers up its gifts only when jogged by something in the present. It isn't a storehouse of fixed images and words, but a dynamic associative network in the brain that is never quiet and is subject to revision each time we retrieve an old picture or old words.

Human beings are repetitive animals. All meaning is generated through repetition.

Dreams are stories made by and for the dreamer.

Being a mother is complicated because its not just a paternal culture making demands on you; its those internal demands and expectations that women have and are self-generated.

Depression is when you think there's nothing to be done. Fortunately I always think there's something to be done.

The truth is that personality inevitably bleeds into all forms of our intellectual life. We all extrapolate from our own lives in order to understand the world.

There is no reason we should expect young children to enter the nocturnal darkness of sleep and dreams without help.

The logic: Reading is a private pursuit, one that often takes place behind closed doors. A young lady might retreat with a book, might even take it into her boudoir, and there, reclining on here silken sheets, imbibing the thrills and chills manufactured by writerly quills, one of her hands, one not absolutely needed to grip the little volume, might wander. The fear, in short, as one-handed reading. [p. 146]

We read each other through our eyes, and anatomically they are an extension of our brains. When we catch someone's eye, we look into a mind.

We sometimes imagine we want what we don't really want.

under our love making I felt a bleakness that couldnt be dispelled. The sadness was in both of us, and I think we pitied ourselves that night, as if we were other people looking down on the couple who lay together on the bed

Intellectual curiosity about one's own illness is certainly born of a desire for mastery. If I couldn't cure myself, perhaps I could at least begin to understand myself.

Reading is perception as translation. The inert signs of an alphabet become living meanings in the mind.

There's a phenomenology of being sick, one that depends on temperament, personal history, and the culture which we live in.

We chart delusions through collective agreement.

Libraries are sexual dream factories. The langour brings it on.

All human states are organic brain states - happiness, sadness, fear, lust, dreaming, doing math problems and writing novels - and our brains are not static.

Demonstration of mastery gives a feeling of power and that feeling of power is a good feeling.

Our brain and our whole nervous system and our whole body are only created in relation to other people and to the environment. So what we have here is an enormously complex notion of both consciousness and unconsciousness. That's why these models get very difficult, because you can't reduce our subjective and intersubjective experience to neural reductions.

Like countless first-year medical students, immersed in the symptoms of one disease after another, I am alert to the tingles and pangs, the throbs and quivers of my mortal body, each one of which is potentially a sign of the end.

I think because mothers usually are the people who take care of us when we're little, and when we're little those mothers are omnipotent, perhaps men even more than women don't like to think about that dependency. That dependency is horror.

Many writers over the centuries simply do not have the reputations they deserve because they were female, and that is an act of suppression.

In effect, painting is the still memory of [the artist's] human motion, and our individual responses to it depend on who we are, on our character, which underlines the simple truth that no person leaves himself behind in order to look at a painting.

I've often thought that one of us is what we imagine, that each of us normalizes the terrible strangeness of inner life with a variety of convenient fictions.

We lose ourselves in stories; that's the beauty of literary art.

Dreaming is another form of thinking, more concrete, more economical, more visual, and often more emotional than the thoughts of the day, but a thinking through of the day, nevertheless.

Writing fiction is like remembering what never happened.

Great books are the ones that are urgent, life-changing, the ones that crack open the reader’s skull and heart.

Time is not outside us, but inside. Only we live with past, present, and future, and the present is too brief to experience anyway; it is retained afterward and then it is either codified or it slips into amnesia.

Not telling is just as interesting as telling I have found. Why speech, that short verbal journey from inside to outside can be excrutiating under certain circumstances is fascinating.

The recollections of an older man are different from those of a younger man. What seemed vital at forty may lose its significance at seventy. We manufacture stories, after all, from the fleeting sensory material that bombards us at every instant, a fragmented series of pictures, conversations, odors, and the touch of things and people. We delete most of it to live with some semblance of order, and the reshuffling of memory goes on until we die.