Siri Hustvedt, A Plea For Eros: Essays Quotes
No doubt I would have felt reverent in less lovely places, because I imagined a past I connected to myself.
New York City is the place where people come to invent, reinvent, or find the room they need to be who they wish to be.
If not violently overthrown, expectation can have a power in itself, can invest a place with what literally isn't there.
The stories and pictures I make for the lives of the people closest to me are the forms of my empathy.
The bottle of red brush on a white table gleamed throughout the remaining years of my childhood as the sign of what was possible there.
This feeling of being "home at last" corresponds to my idea about the city, and idea shaped by books, movies, and plays, an idea of infinite possibility.
Transformation of the self are related to where you are, and identity Is dependent on others.
It can only be that places left behind often become emotionally simplified - that they sound a single note of pain or pleasure, which means that they are never what they were.
What she remembered is undoubtedly something so radically different from the image I gave to her memory that the two may be incompatible.
Immigration inevitably involves error and revision. What I imagined it would be, it's not. For better or worse, some mistake is unavoidable.
Feminism was good for me, as were any number of causes, but as I developed as a thinking person, the truisms and dogmas of every ideology became as worn as that book's cover.
The very idea of a library for me is bound to my mother and father and includes the history of my own metamorphosis through books, fictions that are no less part of me than much of my own history.
The advice is a call to empathy, the ultimate act of the imagination, and the true ground of all fiction.
fiction is necessary to life - not only as books but as dreams, dreams that frame the world and give it meaning.
Every reader writes the book he or she reads, supplying what isn't there, and that creative invention becomes the book.