The Blindfold Quotes

“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

“Distortion is part of desire. We always change the things we want.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Blindfold

“Sometimes even now I think I see him in the street or standing in a window or bent over a book in a coffee shop. And in that instant, before I understand that it's someone else, my lungs tighten and I lose my breath.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Blindfold

“He hunched his shoulders and looked at the floor. With that movement, he entered the past. When he put on his jacket, kissed me again, and walked to the door, he was already a memory.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Blindfold

“Sometimes I feel that what we do and what we say is just a repetition, that's it's all happened before,' I said.
'Déjà vu,' he said, his voice flat.
'No, not that, not identical - vaguely the same, like we're trapped in a pattern or an idea that we can't give up, that leads us by the nose...”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Blindfold

“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, The Blindfold

“The misery I felt was grief. I wanted her back, my old self.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Blindfold

“I watched myself live, Iris, like a movie, and that image of myself is everything. I don't want to betray it. Do you know what I'm talking about? I'm telling you that what I can't bear is the ordinary. I don't want to bore myself, to sink into pedestrian ways of other people - heart-to-heart talks, petty confessions, relationships of habit, not passion. I see those people all around me, and I detest them, so I have to be divorced from myself in order to keep from sliding into a life I find nauseating. It's a matter of appearances, but surfaces are underestimated. The veneer becomes the thing. I rarely distinguish the man in the movie from the spectator anymore.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Blindfold

“With Stephen, I had become a sour, witless bore. With others, I could be light. Men I cared nothing about called me, and every once in a while, I accepted an invitation. On them my indifference worked like an aphrodisiac, Because I didn't want anything, I felt free an jabbered away spinning out all kinds of silliness that seemed only to augment their desire.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Blindfold

“Stephen's face lost its tension, and 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

“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, The Blindfold

“The pleasure was in the staging, the idea of ourselves as a repetition of others. I knew this without saying it, felt my femininity as the game of all women, a mysterious identification in which I lost myself.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Blindfold

“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, The Blindfold

“He was an intense lover, and his zeal created in me a new sense of my own otherness. Sometimes after he was gone, I would examine myself naked in the mirror, and for an instant would imagine I saw what he saw - an enchanted body.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Blindfold

“In good times I cry often, shedding tears easily, but when times are bad, my ducts go dry and I almost never weep.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Blindfold

“My life had shrunk, and when I thought of past events, when I talked to my parents on the phone, when I saw an acquaintance or fellow student on the street, all these things seemed to be from another lifetime.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Blindfold

“The uniformly pretty waitresses discussed the finer points of cocaine, Quaaludes, and other intoxicants, arguing for this one or that, with the energy of young philosophers. My fellow workers read my silence on the subject as moral condemnation, but in truth, I've always been afraid of drugs. The jolts and tingles that might be gained from these substances don't attract me. My interest has always been in maintaining balance, not tipping it.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Blindfold

“My hope made me pathetic, but I comforted myself with the fact that I was my only witness.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Blindfold

“How many other are there? I thought. People, things, seen and then forgotten, leaving nothing behind them, not even the knowledge that they're missing.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Blindfold

“But I missed Ruth terribly, and I understood once she was gone how much her presence colored mine. Ruth was the heroine of her own life story, and when we were together, she made me the heroine of mine. She gave daily hardships the stature of romance and drama.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Blindfold

“I suppose Stanley fell in love with me during those talks about life and books, but he probably loved someone else, a person who wasn't me.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Blindfold

“Alone, I was strident and articulate in a way I could never be when I faced him. His presence made me shrink, and though it irritated me, I also looked forward to that sensation of being dwarfed, couldn't wait to sit beside him in his office again.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Blindfold

“Despite my efforts, I was something less than a model student, subject to passionate eruptions in class and wild excursions into related topics. At home I rehearsed calm deliveries, practiced lowering my voice to make it sound authoritative and cool, but in the heat of the moment, I would always forget.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Blindfold

“But all attractions are alike,' he said. 'They come from an emptiness inside.' He hammered on this chest with his index finger. 'Something's missing and you have to fill it. Books, paintings, people, they're all the same...'
'A lot of people do without books and paintings.'
'True,' he said, 'but that doesn't affect the argument.' Paris turned his head to one side and chewed on his lip. 'Of course, nothing ever does the trick. Nobody's really satisfied for long.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Blindfold

“This small encounter had a disproportionately large effect on me. I saw myself in relief, separate and distinct from the others in the class, and even though he didn't speak to me in that way for a long time, I began to regard Professor Rose as a secret ally. This transformation took place gradually, and I can't say whether it existed solely in my mind or whether he was responsible for it. I know that I started to look forward to seeing him on Tuesdays, that his face was pleasing, his severity undercut by humor, and that I read the assigned books with new zeal.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Blindfold

“In this early memory he looks different from the way I would remember him later.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Blindfold

“His distaste was palpable. Although he cultivated ideas that embraced the perverse and forbidden, Stephen was squeamish, and his adventures were strictly of the fashionable, literary sort.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Blindfold

“Like most people confined to an institution, she had been divested of a past life.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Blindfold

“He interrupted me more frequently and summarized my complaints in an increasingly optimistic light. I couldn't see or feel these changes myself, but Dr. Fish was confident, and I half believed him. The truth is that I participated in the deception. I was studying for my oral exams then, and I was desperate for the treatments to work.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Blindfold