A Plea for Eros Quotes

“I had left small-town, rural life for good, and I had no intention of ever returning, not because I didn't like my home but because I had always known that I would leave. Leaving was part of my life romance, part of an idea I had about myself as a person destined for adventure; and as far as I could tell, adventure lay in the urban wilds of Manhattan, not in the farmland of Minnesota.”
― Siri Hustvedt, A Plea for Eros: Essays

“New York City is the place where people come to invent, reinvent, or find the room they need to be who they wish to be.”
― Siri Hustvedt, A Plea for Eros: Essays

“Aggressive questions are usually pedagogic - that is, the answer has already been written in the mind of the questioner, who then waits with a reply. It's pretend listening.”
― Siri Hustvedt, A Plea for Eros: Essays

“My father once asked me if I knew where yonder was. I said I thought yonder was another word for there. He smiled and said, "No, yonder is between here and there.”
― Siri Hustvedt, A Plea for Eros: Essays

“First loves are often terrible, probably because they are first and there is no conscious history into which they may be absorbed.”
― Siri Hustvedt, A Plea for Eros: Essays

“When I say my wound became political in the years that followed, I don't mean that my involvement in the anti-war movement was somehow insincere or that I have any regrets about my activism. As a champion of the downtrodden, the disenfranchised, the poor, and the oppressed, I found a new outlet for the somewhat irrational but nevertheless strong sense I had of being an outsider in a group - uncomfortable, awkward, and quick to feel a slight. Political feeling can't exist without identification, and mine inevitably went to people without power, In contrast, right-wing ideologies often appeal to those who want to link themselves to authority, people for whom the sight of military parades or soldiers marching off to war is aggrandizing, not painful. Inevitably, there is sublimation in politics, too. It becomes an avenue for suppressed aggression and anger, and I was no exception. And so it was that armed with passion and gorged on political history, I became a firebrand at fourteen. For three years, I read and argued and demonstrated. I marched against the Vietnam War, helped print strike T-shirts at Carleton College after the deaths of four students at Kent State, attended rallies, raised money for war-torn Mozambique, signed petitions, licked envelopes for the American Indian Movement, and turned into a feminist. But even then, I didn't believe all the rhetoric.”
― Siri Hustvedt, A Plea for Eros: Essays

“Feminism was good for me, as were any number of causes, but as I developed as a thinking person, the truisms and dogmas of every ideology became as worn as that book's cover.”
― Siri Hustvedt, A Plea for Eros: Essays

“The articulation of the other's body in words turns it into a map of possible pleasure, effectively distancing that body by transforming it into an erotic object.”
― Siri Hustvedt, A Plea for Eros: Essays

“fiction is necessary to life - not only as books but as dreams, dreams that frame the world and give it meaning.”
― Siri Hustvedt, A Plea for Eros: Essays

“Are not dreams as much a part of living as waking life is?”
― Siri Hustvedt, A Plea for Eros: Essays

“The tangible and intangible collide to cast a spell. But can a person or thing ever be stripped naked? Can we ever discover reality hiding under the meanings we give to people and things? I don't think so. And I don't think Fitzgerald thought so either. His book meditates on the necessity of fiction, not only as lies but as truths.”
― Siri Hustvedt, A Plea for Eros: Essays

“I have always felt that there is a triangular quality to every love affair. There are two lovers and a third element - the idea of being in love itself. I wonder if it is possible to fall in love without this third presence, an imaginary witness to love as a thing of wonder, cast in the glow of our deepest stories about ourselves.”
― Siri Hustvedt, A Plea for Eros: Essays

“The page can resurrect what's lost and what's dead, what's not there anymore and what was never there.”
― Siri Hustvedt, A Plea for Eros: Essays

“Every reader writes the book he or she reads, supplying what isn't there, and that creative invention becomes the book.”
― Siri Hustvedt, A Plea for Eros: Essays

“Each had his own language for seeing, and that language created vision. We all inherit vision just as they did - two men who stood side by side but were nevertheless separated by and intellectual chasm.”
― Siri Hustvedt, A Plea for Eros: Essays

“This feeling of being "home at last" corresponds to my idea about the city, and idea shaped by books, movies, and plays, an idea of infinite possibility.”
― Siri Hustvedt, A Plea for Eros: Essays

“I am afraid of writing, too, because when I write I am always moving toward the unarticulated, the dangerous, the place where the walls don't hold. I don't know what's there, but I'm pulled toward it.”
― Siri Hustvedt, A Plea for Eros: Essays

“There were many books inside me by then, and yet these jolted me with their originality. I met the man before I read what he had written, but if I had not loved his work as I did or if he had not admired my writing, it would have changed things. Our work has been an intimate part of our love affair and marriage for twenty-three years, but what I read wasn't then and isn't now what I know when I'm with him. His work comes from the place in him I can't know.”
― Siri Hustvedt, A Plea for Eros: Essays

“short-lived passions I pursued on my own terms.”
― Siri Hustvedt, A Plea for Eros: Essays

“the forgotten back-and-forth of early life becomes who we are.”
― Siri Hustvedt, A Plea for Eros: Essays

“I was at a dinner party in New York during which the host loudly declared his undying love for his wife. Two weeks later, he left her for another woman. I am as convinced that his declaration was sincere as I am that he was a cipher to himself.”
― Siri Hustvedt, A Plea for Eros: Essays

“But the worst was that as time wore on, I became more and more afraid of myself, or perhaps more conscious of the fear I have always had - a fear that within me is some danger I can't name.”
― Siri Hustvedt, A Plea for Eros: Essays

“My senses remained on high alert, and even thinking back on that time makes me feel giddy. I could never have a similar experience now. I have too much behind me, too many references, stories, too many years of thoughts.”
― Siri Hustvedt, A Plea for Eros: Essays

“If the vulnerable aren't also proud, they are crushed.”
― Siri Hustvedt, A Plea for Eros: Essays

“In college I retreated to the library. I have always loved libraries - the quiet, the smell, the expectation of imminent discovery. In the next book I will find it - some unspeakable pleasure or startling revelation or extraordinary nuance I had never felt or thought of before.”
― Siri Hustvedt, A Plea for Eros: Essays

“I began to understand that ideologies necessarily push, pull, and tug at reality to make it fit the system. Even when they are committed in the service of a noble cause, lies inevitably make me recoil.”
― Siri Hustvedt, A Plea for Eros: Essays

“Through them, I was able to make a turn in myself, and somehow that view from the window seen alone and at night has become an image for what I now recognize as the end of my childhood.”
― Siri Hustvedt, A Plea for Eros: Essays

“Standing there, I am struck by a strong but pleasant sadness. All my anxiety leaves me as I look outside. I stand and look for a while longer and then return to bed.”
― Siri Hustvedt, A Plea for Eros: Essays

“I told myself to remember the snow and to remember my pure, strong happiness at simply being alive to see it. That thought has never left me.”
― Siri Hustvedt, A Plea for Eros: Essays

“It's a sorry little fact that we are often as mysterious to ourselves as we are to others.”
― Siri Hustvedt, A Plea for Eros: Essays