Siri Hustvedt Quotes

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

~ Siri Hustvedt

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.

~ Siri Hustvedt

We chart delusions through collective agreement.

~ Siri Hustvedt

I was happy without having sought happiness.

~ Siri Hustvedt

I had no friends. Was I happy? I was wildly happy. Sitting on my bed, which took up most of the space in that narrow room, I whispered prayers of thanks that I was really and truly here in New York, beginning another life. I worshipped the place. I feasted on every beautiful inch of it - the crowds, the fruit and vegetable stands, the miles of pavement, the graffiti, even the garbage. All of it sent me into paroxysms of joy. Needless to say, my elevation had an irrational cast to it. Had I not arrived laden with ideas of urban paradise, I might have felt bad losing sleep, might have felt lonely and disoriented, but instead I walked around town like a love-struck idiot, inhaling the difference between there and here.

~ Siri Hustvedt

It is true that I suffered in a difficult and stupid love affair and that I worked at one bad job after another to try to keep myself going. Nevertheless, I remember that time as extraordinary, and I wouldn't trade it for anything. I don't even wish now that I had more money. And had I been asked if I was suffering at the time, I would have said a defiant no.

~ Siri Hustvedt

Walking across campus made me feel sad, and I thought to myself, I wasn't happy there. Then, after reading, we walked past Butler Library. It was dark, but the light inside illuminated the windows. Students were reading and working, and those lit windows gave me a wonderful, weightless feeling. I understood for the first time how happy I had been there - in the library.

~ Siri Hustvedt

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

~ Siri Hustvedt

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

~ Siri Hustvedt

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.

~ Siri Hustvedt

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

~ Siri Hustvedt

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

~ Siri Hustvedt

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

~ Siri Hustvedt

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.

~ Siri Hustvedt

We must all allow ourselves the fantasy of projection from time to time, a chance to clothe ourselves in the imaginary gowns and tails of what has never been and never will be. This gives some polish to our tarnished lives, and sometimes we may choose one dream over another, and in the choosing find some respite from ordinary sadness. After all, we, none of us, can ever untangle the knot of fictions that make up that wobbly thing we call a self.

~ Siri Hustvedt

I've come to think of consciousness as a continuum of states, from fully awake cogitation to daydreaming to the altered consciousness of hallucinations and dreams. Still, interpreting dreams can only take place when we're awake. I believe meaning is what the mind makes and wants. It's essential to perception and to consciousness in all its forms. But the important meanings of psychotherapy are subjective. There's a lot of research that confirms that drem content reflects the dreamer's emotional conflicts.

~ Siri Hustvedt

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

~ Siri Hustvedt

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

~ Siri Hustvedt

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

~ Siri Hustvedt

In order to be accepted, women must compensate for their ambition and strength by being nice. Men don't have to be nearly as much d as women. I do not believe women are natively nicer than men. They may learn that niceness brings rewards and hat names ambition is often punished. They may ingratiate themselves because such behavior is rewarded and a strategy of stealth may lead to better results than being forthright, but even when women are open and direct, they are not always seen or heard.

~ Siri Hustvedt

I am fascinated that no one I have read seems to have noticed that the literature on Picasso continually turns grown-up women into girls.

~ Siri Hustvedt

No one rejoices more in revenge than women, wrote Juvenal. Women do most delight in revenge, wrote Sir Thomas Browne. Sweet is revenge, especially to women, wrote Lord Byron. And I say, I wonder why, boys. I wonder why.

~ Siri Hustvedt

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.

~ Siri Hustvedt

Artists are cannibals. We consume other artists, and they become part of us—flesh and bone—only to be spewed out again in our own works.

~ Siri Hustvedt

The best works of art are never innocuous: they alter the viewer's perceptual predictions. It is only when the patterns of our vision are disrupted that we truly pay attention and must ask ourselves what we are looking at.

~ Siri Hustvedt

The history of art is full of women lying around naked for erotic consumption by men.

~ Siri Hustvedt

There is no perception without memory. But good art surprise us. Good art reorients our expectations, forces us to break the pattern, to see in a new way.

~ Siri Hustvedt

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.

~ Siri Hustvedt

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]

~ Siri Hustvedt

I see what I did not see. I experience that which is outside my own experience. This is the magic of reading novels. This is the working out of the problem of illusion. I take a book off the shelf. I open it up and begin to read, and what I discover in its pages is real.

~ Siri Hustvedt

We drank coffee. We talked. She loved Charles Dickens, whom she read in Norwegian. Years after she was dead, I wrote a dissertation on Dickens, and though my study of the great man would no doubt have alarmed her, I had a funny feeling that by taking on the English novelist I was returning to my Norwegian roots.

~ Siri Hustvedt

Maybe the world isn't enough, or maybe the distinction between the world and fiction is not so clear. Fiction is made from the stuff of the world, after all, which includes dreams and wishes and fantasies and memory. And it is never really made alone, but from the material between and among us: language.

~ Siri Hustvedt

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

~ Siri Hustvedt

The tangible and intangible collide to cast a spell. But can a person or thing ever be stripped naked? Can we ever discover reality hiding under the meanings we give to people and things? I don't think so. And I don't think Fitzgerald thought so either. His book meditates on the necessity of fiction, not only as lies but as truths.

~ Siri Hustvedt

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

~ Siri Hustvedt

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.

~ Siri Hustvedt

But that's why you're upset now. Fiction is not life.''You don't believe that.''I think I do.''You know as well as I do that the line can't be drawn, that we're infected at every moment by fictions of all kinds, that it's inescapable.''Don't be a sophist,' he said. 'There is a world and it's palpable.''I don't mean that,' I said. 'I mean that it's hard really to see it, that it's all hazy with out dreams and fantasies.

~ Siri Hustvedt

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.

~ Siri Hustvedt

The Singularity is at once an escape and a birth fantasy. I said to him: A Zeus dream that avoids the organic body altogether. Brand-new creatures burst forth from men's heads. Presto! The mother and her evil vagina disappears.

~ Siri Hustvedt

My purely practical advice: Don't get excited. Don't raise your voice. Bite back. Bite back hard, but never cry.

~ Siri Hustvedt