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.

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

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

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

Memory changes as a person matures.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Dreams are stories made by and for the dreamer.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

Crippled and crazy, we hobble toward the finish line, pen in hand.

We chart delusions through collective agreement.

Memory is essential to who we are, and memories can be both implicit and explicit - unconscious and conscious.

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 fictive is an emormous territory it turns out, its boundaries vague, and there is little certainty about where it begins and ends.

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

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

Writing fiction is like remembering what never happened.

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

Women really are not supposed to be imaginative. That creativity of this kind is supposed to belong to men. You know, because women make babies. I find the double standards shocking.

Men generally do not see women as competition.

It is fascinating to me that when the lists of the great writers are trotted out year after year, you often find lists without a single woman mentioned.

The old story is true:Women have to be less emotional than men.

There is this assumption that much of what I write is about my life, and that simply is not true.

Good books, written by men or women, are ones in which you lose consciousness of the person writing the sentences.

After years of having immersed myself in science, I do think that if you master several different ways of thinking, it makes your own thought processes more agile.

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

I myself have perceived women's actions as more aggressive than I would have in men because I too am walking around with my own biases. The way to fight them is to become conscious of them.

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

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

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.

Every one of us is prone to implicit sexual prejudices, including women.

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.

True 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.