The Summer Without Men Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Correlation is not cause, it is just a 'music of chance'.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Summer Without Men

“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 Summer Without Men

“I said very little. I knew that for the time being I was the open air, the place to put the words, not a real interlocutor. And then, ekthout a transition of any kind, she began to tell me .... {p. 134}”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Summer Without Men

“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, The Summer Without Men

“Outside, in the hallway, my mother stopped. She pressed both hands to her chest, closed her eyes, and said under her breath, 'It's so bitter.'
'What, Mama?'
'Old age.' [p. 187]”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Summer Without Men

“an infant no more than six weeks old--a person in the still floppy, stunned by visual stimuli, sucking, arm and foot waving, grunting, grimacing phase of life. How I had loved that stage in my own Daisy's path of becoming. [p.46]”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Summer Without Men

“The transience of human feeling is nothing short of ludicrous. My mercurial fluctuations in the course of a single evening made me feel as if I had a character made pf chewing gum. I had fallen into the ugly depths of self-pity, a terrain just above the even more hideous lowlands of despair. Then, easily distracted twit that I am, I had, soon after, found myself on maternal heights, where I had practically swooned with pleasure as I bobbed and fondled the borrowed homunculus next door. I had eaten well, drunk too much wine, and embraced a young woman I hardly knew. In short, I had thoroughly enjoyed myself and had every intention of doing so again. [p. 59]”
― 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

“I remembered that time of life when most of what matters can be summed up by the phase 'the other kids,' and it struck me as pitiful. The dread was more complex. ... Dread is a lure, and I cold feel its tug, but why? ... Perception is never passive. We are not only receivers of the world; we also actively produce it. There is a hallucinatory quality to all perception, and illusions are easy to create. [pp. 656-66]”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Summer Without Men

“Shorn of intimacy and seen from a considerable distance, we are all comic characters, farcical buffoons who bumble through our lives, making fine messes as we go, but when you get close, the ridiculous quickly fades into the sordid or the tragic or the merely sad. [p. 73]”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Summer Without Men

“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