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, What I Loved

“Pain is always emotional. Fear and depression keep constant company with chronic hurting.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Shaking Woman, or A History of My Nerves

“I've always thought of wholeness and integration as necessary myths. We're gragmented beings who cement ourselves together, but there are always cracks. Living with the cracks is part of being, well, reasonably healthy.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Sorrows of an American

“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

“Dreams are stories made by and for the dreamer, and each dreamer has his own folds to open and knots to untie.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Shaking Woman, or A History of My Nerves

“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, The Shaking Woman, or A History of My Nerves

“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, The Shaking Woman, or A History of My Nerves

“Memory is essential to who we are, and memories can be both implicit and explicit - unconscious and conscious.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Shaking Woman, or A History of My Nerves

“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, The Blindfold

“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, The Blindfold

“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, The Shaking Woman, or A History of My Nerves

“There's a phenomenology of being sick, one that depends on temperament, personal history, and the culture which we live in.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Shaking Woman, or A History of My Nerves

“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, The Shaking Woman, or A History of My Nerves

“There is no future without a past, because what is to be cannot be imagined except as a form of repetition.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Summer Without Men

“Reading is a private pursuit; one that takes place behind closed doors.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Summer Without Men

“I will turn human anatomy into roses and stars and sea. I will dissect the beloveds body in metaphor.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Summer Without Men

“I've always thought of wholeness and integration as necessary myths. We're fragmented beings who cement ourselves together, but there are always cracks. Living with the cracks is part of being, well, reasonably healthy”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Sorrows of an American

“It seems to me that going backward sometimes means going forward.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Shaking Woman, or A History of My Nerves

“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, The Shaking Woman, or A History of My Nerves

“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, The Sorrows of an American

“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

“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, The Summer Without Men

“Lots of women read fiction. Most men don't. Women read fiction written by women and by men. Most men don't. If a man opens a novel,. he likes to have a masculine name on the cover; it's reassuring somehow. You never know what might happen to that external genitalia if you immerse yourself in imaginary doings concocted by someone with the goods on the inside. [pp. 145-146]”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Summer Without Men

“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, The Sorrows of an American

“Time is not outside us, but inside. Only we live with past, present, and future, and the present is too brief to experience anyway; it is retained afterward and then it is either codified or it slips into amnesia.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Summer Without Men

“Memory changes as a person matures.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Shaking Woman, or A History of My Nerves

“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, The Shaking Woman, or A History of My Nerves

“And the pen, as it were, Dear Reader, is now in my hand, and I am claiming the advantage, taking it for myself, for you will notice that the written word hides the body of the one who writes. For all you know, I might be a MAN in disguise. Unlikely, you say, with all this feminist prattle flying out here and there and everywhere, but can you be sure?”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Summer Without Men

“Libraries are sexual dream factories. The langour brings it on.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Summer Without Men

“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.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Sorrows of an American

“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

“...a sense that even if every scrap of a life were saved, thrown into a giant mound and then carefully sifted to extract all possible meaning, it would not add up to a life.”
― Siri Hustvedt, What I Loved

“The very next day, we were told that Abigail had had a massive stroke. She was alive, but the woman we had known had vanished. She did not know where she was or who she was. The alarm clock had gone off. The very old languish and die. We know that, buy the very old know it far better than the rest of us. They live in a world of continual loss and this, as my mother had said, is bitter. [p. 172]”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Summer Without Men

“We waste those eggs like crazy, of course, flushing them out every month in days of bleeding, but then most sperm are wholly useless as well, a thought to be considered elsewhere at greater length.”
― Siri Hustvedt

“I often felt the girls' speech was interchangeable, without any individuality whatsoever, a kind of herd-speak they had all agreed upon .... [p. 48]”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Summer Without Men

“(... 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, The Summer Without Men

“Widowers marry again because it makes their lives easier. Widows often don't, because it makes their lives harder. [p. 61]”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Summer Without Men

“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 Sorrows of an American

“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, The Sorrows of an American

“Dr. S. talked to me about magical thinking. She was right. Much depends on chance, on what we can't control, on others. She did not say that writing to Boris was a bad idea, but then she never judged anything. That was her magic. [p. 85]”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Summer Without Men

“Minusta tuntuu hyvältä nähdä luuni. Pidän siitä että näen ja tunnen ne. Kun minun ja luitteni välillä on liikaa lihaa, tuntuu kuin jotenkin etääntyisin itsestäni. Ymmärrätkö?”
― Siri Hustvedt, What I Loved

“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

“No existe el futuro sin el pasado, porque lo que va a suceder no se puede imaginar más como una forma de repetición.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Summer Without Men

“Worries about the power of a doctor's suggestions to influence and shape his patient's mind, whether they are made under hypnosis or not, are still with us.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Shaking Woman, or A History of My Nerves

“Todas las sustancias individuales fluyen y están en movimiento, perdiendo unas partes de sí mismas y recibiendo otras que vienen a ellas de cualquier sitio.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Summer Without Men

“La moraleja de todo esto es que la extraña relajación fomenta el placer y que la relajación es un estado de apertura casi completo ante cualquier cosa que pueda sobrevenir. También supone irreflexión. Empecé a preguntarme si existirían personas que viviesen la mayor parte del tiempo sin ataduras, sin pensar, dejándose llevar.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Summer Without Men

“Doesn’t the seventeenth-century use of the measurement yard for penis strike you as a bit of an exaggeration, unless the yard then was not the yard now?”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Summer Without Men

“It is impossible to divine a story while you are living it; it is shapeless; an inchoate procession of words and things, and let us be frank: We never recover what was. Most of it vanishes. And yet, as I sit here at my desk and try to bring it back, that summer not so long ago, I know turns were made that affected what followed. Some of them stand out like bumps on a relief map, but then I was unable to perceive them because my view of things was lost in the undifferentiated flatness of living one moment after another. Time is not outside us, but inside. Only we live with past, present, and future, and the present is too brief to experience anyway; it is retained afterward and then it is either codified or it slips into amnesia. Consciousness is the product of delay. Sometime in early June, during the second week of my stay, I made a small turn without being aware of it, and I think it began with the secret amusements.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Summer Without Men

“We chart delusions through collective agreement.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Summer Without Men

“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, The Summer Without Men