Siri Hustvedt Quotes

I don't want the words to be naked the way they are in faxes or in the computer. I want them to be covered by an envelope that you have to rip open in order to get at. I want there to be a waiting time -a pause between the writing and the reading. I want us to be careful about what we say to each other. I want the miles between us to be real and long. This will be our law -that we write our dailiness and our suffering very, very carefully.

~ Siri Hustvedt

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

~ Siri Hustvedt

Because I knew so much about him, because I had been close to him, I couldn't bring the various fragments of my experience with him into a single coherent image. The truth was mobile and contradictory, and I was willing to live with that.

~ Siri Hustvedt

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.

~ Siri Hustvedt

I read the stories I've been told in my own way and make a narrative of them. Narrative is a chain of links, and I link furiously, merrily hurdling over holes, gaps, and secrets. Nevertheless, I try to remind myself that the holes are there. They are always there, not only in the lives of others but in my own life as well.

~ Siri Hustvedt

The truth is that what fascinates me is not so much being in a place as not being there: how places live in the mind once you have left them, how they are imagined before you arrive, or how they are seemingly called out of nothing to illustrate a thought or story like my tree down yonder. These mental spaces map our Innes lives more fully than any real map, delineating the borders of here and there that also shape what we see in the present.

~ Siri Hustvedt

Immigration inevitably involves error and revision. What I imagined it would be, it's not. For better or worse, some mistake is unavoidable.

~ Siri Hustvedt

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

~ Siri Hustvedt

I imagined Stephen's companion was a beautiful woman. Her form and coloring changed with my moving thoughts, but the idea that she existed remained to nag at me, and even though she was only a spook of my jealousy, I couldn't stop the surge of fantasies about her and Stephen. By the time I left the library, I had invented several elaborate plots involving the two of them.

~ Siri Hustvedt

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.

~ Siri Hustvedt

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

~ Siri Hustvedt

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.

~ Siri Hustvedt

Memory changes as a person matures.

~ Siri Hustvedt

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

~ Siri Hustvedt

What she remembered is undoubtedly something so radically different from the image I gave to her memory that the two may be incompatible.

~ Siri Hustvedt

My memory of the school building itself, its rooms and lockers, blackboards, and hallways, bring on a heavy, oppressive feeling. Whether I was more unhappy in school than any of my friends I don't know. I never would have said I didn't like school, and there are moments I distinctly remember enjoying, but these truths don't alter my memory of that place.

~ Siri Hustvedt

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.

~ Siri Hustvedt

It may be that I link every library to that first one - to my early childhood experience of drawing on the floor near my father's desk. A library is of course a real place, but it is also an unreal one. What happens there is mostly silent. I think I've always liked the whispering aspect of libraries, the hushing librarians and my feeling of solitude among many.

~ Siri Hustvedt

Do you know that I can't remember her face? Try as I may, it will not be conjured. I can tell you what she looked like; I can recite a description of her features, part by part, but I cannot evoke the whole face.''Don't you have a photograph?''Photographs!' He spat out the word. 'I'm talking about true recollection - seeing the face.

~ Siri Hustvedt

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

~ Siri Hustvedt

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.

~ Siri Hustvedt

It appears that time has turned that young woman, who imagined herself a romantic heroine, into something of a comic character, but I remain fond of her. We are relatives, after all.

~ Siri Hustvedt

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.

~ Siri Hustvedt

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

~ Siri Hustvedt

I know, but he must have felt it that way, that evil was an emptiness, a lack of something, not a presence.'He turned his head fast and looked at me. 'That's what desire is, isn't it? The lack of something.

~ Siri Hustvedt

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

~ Siri Hustvedt

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

~ Siri Hustvedt

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.

~ Siri Hustvedt

Accumulated experience always alters perception of the past.

~ Siri Hustvedt

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

~ Siri Hustvedt

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.

~ Siri Hustvedt

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.

~ Siri Hustvedt

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

~ Siri Hustvedt

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

~ Siri Hustvedt

My mother said the bizarre name Raccoona had surely been inspired, at least on a subliminal level, by the masks raccoons don't wear but simply have - the ones given them by nature..... [S]he pointed out that Le Guin had suspected all along that Raccoona and Tiptree were two authors that came from the same source, but in a letter to Alice she wrote that she preferred Tiptree to Raccoona: 'Raccoona, I think, has less control, thus less wit and power.'Le Guin, Mother said, had understood something deep. 'When you take on a male persona, something happens.'When I asked her what that was, she sat back in her chair, waved her arm, and smiled. 'You get to be the father.

~ Siri Hustvedt

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.

~ Siri Hustvedt

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.

~ Siri Hustvedt

Within weeks of my arrival in New York, I was someone else, not because there had been a revolution in my psychological makeup or any trauma. It was simply this: people saw me in a light in which I had never been seen before.

~ Siri Hustvedt

That night as I lay in bed, I thought of several things I could have said and mourned the fact that my wit usually bloomed late, peaking when it no longer mattered, during the solitary hours close to midnight.

~ Siri Hustvedt

We all start out the same in our mothers' wombs. We, all of us, when floating in the amniotic sea of our earliest oblivion, have gonads. If the Y chromosome didn't swoop in to act on the gonads of some of us and make testes, we would all become women. In biology, the Genesis story is reversed: Adam becomes Adam out of Eve, not the other way around.

~ Siri Hustvedt