Siri Hustvedt Quotes

In this early memory he looks different from the way I would remember him later.

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.

Infancy is irretrievable. Its memories live underground. To what extent they return by stealth or are triggered by various catalysts remains an ongoing question.

No doubt I would have felt reverent in less lovely places, because I imagined a past I connected to myself.

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.

Old places fire the internal weather of our pasts. The mild winds, aching calms, and hard storms of forgotten emotions return to us when we return to the spots where they happened.

The advice is a call to empathy, the ultimate act of the imagination, and the true ground of all fiction.

Only the unprotected self can feel joy.

fiction is necessary to life - not only as books but as dreams, dreams that frame the world and give it meaning.

Are not dreams as much a part of living as waking life is?

Every reader writes the book he or she reads, supplying what isn't there, and that creative invention becomes the book.

We are all dying one by one. We all smell of mortality, and we can't wash it off.

I was happy without having sought happiness.

Most of us accept that although we may believe our dreams to be real events, upon waking, we can tell the difference between nocturnal hallucinations and reality.

Distortion is part of desire. We always change the things we want.

Accumulated experience always alters perception of the past.

Transformation of the self are related to where you are, and identity Is dependent on others.

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.

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.

The stories and pictures I make for the lives of the people closest to me are the forms of my empathy.

If not violently overthrown, expectation can have a power in itself, can invest a place with what literally isn't there.

Insanity is a state of profound self-absorption.

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.

In August of 2002, I survived a car accident. Although I can still see the van speeding toward us, I cannot bring to mind the crash itself - only its aftermath.

If something's not working, it's wonderful to have a reader you can trust to say, 'Actually, you've gone off the deep end here'.

It's hard to penetrate characters who are very cut off and lack empathy and to do it with sympathy. It's so easy to make a damaged character repugnant.

Each person does see the world in a different way. There is not a single, unifying, objective truth. We're all limited by our perspective.

The idea that skiing might not be fun, might not be for everyone, had never occurred to me. Where I come from, the sport signified pleasure, nature, family happiness.

Creativity has always depended on openness and flexibility, so let us hope for more of both in the future.