A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women Quotes

“Fiction is not an escape from the world either. Imaginary experience is also experience. O”
― Siri Hustvedt, A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind

“The genius of women has always been easy to discount, suppress, or attribute to the nearest man. When”
― Siri Hustvedt, A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind

“Words accrue and lose meaning through a semantic mobility dependent on the community in which they thrive, and these meanings cannot be divorced from bodily sensation and emotion. Slang emerges among a circle of speakers. Irony requires double consciousness, reading one meaning and understanding another. Elegant prose involves a feeling for the rhythms and the music of sentences, a product of the sensual pleasure a writer takes in the sounds of words and the varying metric beats of sentences. Creative translation must take all this into account. If a meaning is lost in one sentence, it might be gained or added to the next one. Such considerations are not strictly logical. They do not involve a step-by-step plan but come from the translator’s felt understanding of the two languages involved. Rodney”
― Siri Hustvedt, A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind

“Artists are cannibals. We consume other artists, and they become part of us—flesh and bone—only to be spewed out again in our own works.”
― Siri Hustvedt, A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind

“In order to be accepted, women must compensate for their ambition and strength by being nice. Men don't have to be nearly as much d as women. I do not believe women are natively nicer than men. They may learn that niceness brings rewards and hat names ambition is often punished. They may ingratiate themselves because such behavior is rewarded and a strategy of stealth may lead to better results than being forthright, but even when women are open and direct, they are not always seen or heard.”
― Siri Hustvedt, A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind

“The best works of art are never innocuous: they alter the viewer's perceptual predictions. It is only when the patterns of our vision are disrupted that we truly pay attention and must ask ourselves what we are looking at.”
― Siri Hustvedt, A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind

“When I am stuck in a book, the feeling is similar. I ask myself what is supposed to happen now. Why is this wrong? Why is what I am writing about this character a lie? How is it possible to lie in fiction? Believe me, it is. When I find the truth I know it. What is that knowing? It is not theoretical. It is emotional. The sentence on the page feels right because it answers a feeling in me, and that feeling is a form of remembering. Art is always made for someone else. That someone is not a known person. She or he has no face, but art is never made in isolation. When I write, I am always speaking to someone, and the book is made between me and that imaginary other.”
― Siri Hustvedt, A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind

“Los patriarcas nos defraudan. No ven y no escuchan. Suelen permanecer ciegos y hacer oídos sordos a las mujeres, se pavonean, alardean y actúan como si no estuviéramos allí. Y no siempre son hombres. A veces son mujeres, también ciegas que se odian a sí mismas. Están atrapadas en los hábitos perceptivos de los siglos, en las expectativas que han llegado a gobernar su mente.”
― Siri Hustvedt, La mujer que mira a los hombres que miran a las mujeres

“El amor es la cura, pero el odio a menudo forma parte del proceso.”
― Siri Hustvedt, La mujer que mira a los hombres que miran a las mujeres

“My purely practical advice: Don't get excited. Don't raise your voice. Bite back. Bite back hard, but never cry.”
― Siri Hustvedt, A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind

“The history of art is full of women lying around naked for erotic consumption by men.”
― Siri Hustvedt, A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind

“I am fascinated that no one I have read seems to have noticed that the literature on Picasso continually turns grown-up women into girls.”
― Siri Hustvedt, A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind

“And perception is a complex phenomenon. Our brains are not cameras or recording devices. Visual perception is active and shaped by both conscious and unconscious forces. Expectation is crucial to perceptual experience, and what to expect about how the world works is learned, and once something is learned well, it becomes unconscious.”
― Siri Hustvedt, A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind

“People don’t come to know the world exclusively through their senses; rather, their affective states influence the processing of sensory stimulation from the very moment an object is encountered.”6 A vital aspect of any object’s meaning resides in the feelings it evokes of pleasure, distress, admiration, confusion. For example, depending on its emotional importance or salience, a viewer may perceive an object as closer or more distant. And this psychobiological feeling is a creature of the past, of expectation, of having learned to read the world.”
― Siri Hustvedt, A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind

“What constitutes rigorous thinking? Is ambiguity dangerous or is it liberating? Why are the sciences regarded as hard and masculine and the arts and the humanities as soft and feminine? And why is hard usually perceived as so much better than soft?”
― Siri Hustvedt, A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind

“The physicist’s, the biologist’s, the historian’s, the philosopher’s, and the artist’s modes of knowing are different. I am wary of absolutism in all its forms. In my experience, scientists are more alarmed by such a statement than people in the humanities. It smacks of relativism, the idea that there is no right and wrong, no objective truth to be found, or, even worse, no external world, no reality. But to say that one is suspicious of absolutes is not the same as saying, for example, that the laws of physics do not theoretically apply to everything. At the same time, physics is not complete, and disagreements among physicists are ongoing. Even settled questions may produce more questions.”
― Siri Hustvedt, A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind

“Emotion is always part of perception, not distinct from it.”
― Siri Hustvedt, A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind

“If one day Balloon Dog’s value bursts and shrivels in a Koons crash, we can only hope that Anonymous has an ongoing relationship with his orange pooch that can sustain the inevitable inflations and deflations of all speculative markets. In fact, a balloon serves as a nice metaphor for the lessons of history: you blow and you blow and you blow, and the thing gets larger and larger and larger still, and in your excitement you forget the laws of physics, and you begin to believe that your balloon is like no other balloon in the world—there is no limit to its size. And then, it pops.”
― Siri Hustvedt, A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind

“There is no pure sensation of anything, not in feeling pain, not in tasting wine, and not in looking at art. All of our perceptions are contextually coded, and that contextual coding does not remain outside us in the environment but becomes a psycho-physiological reality within us”
― Siri Hustvedt, A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind

“Martin Buber believed that the foundation for human existence is relational. People can create between-zones of resonant meaning. In a letter to Ludwig Binswanger, the Swiss psychiatrist, he wrote, “Dialog in my sense implies the necessity of the unforeseen, and its basic element is surprise, the surprising mutuality.” Isn’t this what happens when I hear the words spoken to me in the room as alive, not dead. Isn’t it always a surprise?”
― Siri Hustvedt, A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind

“In one of my novels, The Summer Without Men, my character Mia says, I will write myself elsewhere. This is the motion of the imagination. I won’t stay here. I’ll move away in my mind, become someone else, enter another story. This is the work of conscious memory, too. I recollect my old self in the past and shape a story for her. I imagine myself in the future and have a story for that projected self, too. When I write a novel, I always feel as if I am dredging up old memories, trying to get the story right. But how do I know what story is right? Why one story and not another?”
― Siri Hustvedt, A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind

“Our conscious autobiographical memories are notoriously unreliable. Freud called this instability Nachträglichkeit. Memories are not fixed but mutable. The present alters the past. Imagination and fantasy play an important role in remembering. Memories are creative and active, not passive. In his Outlines of Psychology (1897), Wilhelm Wundt writes, “It is obvious that practically no sharp line of demarcation can be drawn between images of imagination and those of memory . . . All our memories are therefore made of ‘fancy and truth’ [Wahrheit und Dichtung]. Memory-images change under the influence of our feelings and volition to images of imagination, and we generally deceive ourselves with their resemblance to real experiences.”
― Siri Hustvedt, A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind

“Art can speak to what falls outside theory, and it can also embody felt ideas.”
― Siri Hustvedt, A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind

“Jackson Pollock.”
― Siri Hustvedt, La mujer que mira a los hombres que miran a las mujeres: Ensayos sobre feminismo, arte y ciencia (Los Tres Mundos)

“The viewer’s emotion is born of a profound recognition of himself in the story that is being played out onstage before him. He engages in a participatory, embodied mirroring relation with the dancers, which evades articulation in language. Susanne Langer is writing about music in the following passage from Philosophy in a New Key, but her commentary can be applied equally well to dance: “The real power of music lies in the fact that it can be ‘true’ to the life of feeling in a way that language cannot; for its significant forms have that ambivalence of content which words cannot have.” Musical meanings arrive, as Langer puts it, “below the threshold of consciousness, [and] certainly outside the pale of discursive thinking.”
― Siri Hustvedt, A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind

“Art is a reaching toward, a bid to be seen and understood and recognized by another. It involves a form of transference.”
― Siri Hustvedt, A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind

“Ideas become part of our perceptions, but we are not always conscious of them. The story of art is continually being revised by art movements, by money and collectors, by “definitive” museum shows, by new concerns, discoveries, and ideologies that alter the telling of the past. Every story yokes together disparate elements in time, and every story, by its very nature, leaps over a lot.”
― Siri Hustvedt, A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind

“In the arts feeling is always meaning.”
― Siri Hustvedt, A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind

“Without a viewer, a reader, a listener, art is dead. Something happens between me and it, an “it” that carries in itself another person’s willed act, a thing suffused with another person’s subjectivity, and in it I may feel pain, humor, sexual desire, discomfort. And that is why I don’t treat artworks as I would treat a chair, but I don’t treat them as a real person either.”
― Siri Hustvedt, A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind

“I am aware of my feelings—my awe, irritation, distress, and admiration—but for the time being my perception is filled up by the painted person. She is of me while I look and, later, she is of me when I remember her. In memory, she may not be exactly as she is when I stand directly in front of the painting but rather some version of her that I carry in my mind.”
― Siri Hustvedt, A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind