quotes by Siri Hustvedt

"In May, she wrote to tell me that she was coming to New york or a week in June. She was going to stay with me, but her letters made it clear that the visit didnt mean a resumption for our old life. As the day approached, my agitation mounted. By the morning of her arrival, it had reached a pitch that felt something like an inner scream.The very thought that I would soon see Erica again didnt excite me as much as wound me. As I wandered around the loft trying to calm myself, I realized that I was holding my chest like a man who had just been stabbed. After sitting down, I tried to untangled that feeling of injury but couldnt do it - not fully."
— Siri Hustvedt (What I Loved)

"under our love making I felt a bleakness that couldnt be dispelled. The sadness was in both of us, and I think we pitied ourselves that night, as if we were other people looking down on the couple who lay together on the bed"
— Siri Hustvedt (What I Loved)

"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

"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 (The Sorrows of an American: A Novel)

"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 (Mysteries of the Rectangle: Essays on Painting)