Top 100 Siri Hustvedt Quotes
#1. People imagine that hope has degrees, but I think not. There is hope and there is no hope.
Siri Hustvedt
#2. 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
#3. The brain is an immensely complex organ, and many mysteries remain. Exactly how brain and mind or soma and psyche are related is one of them.
Siri Hustvedt
#4. Memory is essential to who we are, and memories can be both implicit and explicit - unconscious and conscious.
Siri Hustvedt
#5. It is tempting to think of this form of insomnia, the inability to fall asleep, as a disease of agency and control: the inability to relinquish high self-reflexive consciousness for the vulnerable, ignorant regions of slumber in which we know not what we do.
Siri Hustvedt
#6. Within weeks of my arrival in New York, I was someone else, not because there had been a revolution in my psychological makeup or any trauma. It was simply this: people saw me in a light in which I had never been seen before.
Siri Hustvedt
#7. How she loved you, her bubeleh, her boychik, her darling, but there was something cloying in that love, something theatrical and selfish, and you knew it and, as soon as you were big enough, you kept her at a safe distance.
Siri Hustvedt
#9. It is not that there is no difference between men and women; it is how much difference that difference makes, and how we choose to frame it.
Siri Hustvedt
#10. What she remembered is undoubtedly something so radically different from the image I gave to her memory that the two may be incompatible.
Siri Hustvedt
#11. Libraries are sexual dream factories. The langour brings it on.
Siri Hustvedt
#12. The man was heavy with life. So often it's lightness that we admire. Those people who appear weightless and unburdened, who hover instead of walk, attract us with their defiance of ordinary gravity. Their carelessness mimics happiness, but Bill had none of that.
Siri Hustvedt
#13. I'd been writing poems for many years, but most of them I didn't like. Then, when I was 23, I wrote one I did like, sent it to 'The Paris Review' - the highest publication I could think of - and they accepted it. No other moment in my literary life has quite come close to that.
Siri Hustvedt
#14. She meant that if your conscience holds you back, if it muddles the purity of your desire, if it gives you mixed feelings, don't do it.
Siri Hustvedt
#15. My feeling is, when you are writing an essay, you don't make anything up. This may be a very Protestant notion, and I'm aware of the fact that memory is fallible, that if I had access to films or some absolute documentary evidence of what happened, it might look different; we get confused and fuzzy.
Siri Hustvedt
#16. The brain-mind is not a computer, and regarding it as one has led to a variety of theoretical dead ends.
Siri Hustvedt
#17. My greatest pleasure is spending time with my family: my husband and daughter, but also my mother, my three sisters, and their families.
Siri Hustvedt
#18. In this early memory he looks different from the way I would remember him later.
Siri Hustvedt
#19. I had no destination, just the will to go, and I went fast.
Siri Hustvedt
#20. We cannot wish our worlds into being. Much depends on chance, on what we can't control, on others.
Siri Hustvedt
#21. Nobody knows what either sleep or waking consciousness is, even though these two have long been seen as the two sides of being: part of life's unvarying diurnal rhythm.
Siri Hustvedt
#22. I was glib, even witty, or at least that's how I imagined myself.
Siri Hustvedt
#23. It's odd the way life works, the way it mutates and wanders, the way one thing becomes another.
Siri Hustvedt
#24. There is no future without a past, because what is to be cannot be imagined except as a form of repetition.
Siri Hustvedt
#25. In sleep, we leave behind the sensory stimulation of the outside world.
Siri Hustvedt
#26. The Singularity is at once an escape and a birth fantasy. I said to him: A Zeus dream that avoids the organic body altogether. Brand-new creatures burst forth from men's heads. Presto! The mother and her evil vagina disappears.
Siri Hustvedt
#27. I mean that you've invented the story yourself. It belong to you, not me. You've already chosen an ending, a way out. I suppose it's inevitable that you want satisfaction.
Siri Hustvedt
#28. 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
#29. Sleep resistance, bouts of insomnia, nightmares, night terrors, crawling into bed with parents in the middle of the night - all these are so common among children, it seems fair to call them 'normal.'
Siri Hustvedt
#30. Many scholars working in the humanities have already shown interest in brain research. For years, contemporary theory in the humanities has left the body and biology out of their discussions.
Siri Hustvedt
#31. The black-and-white figures of the photographs have had to stand in place of my memory and yet I have always felt that their unmarked graves became a part of me. What was unwritten then is inscribed into what I call myself.
Siri Hustvedt
#32. When I spoke to her, I had the feeling that her thoughts had been nourished in wide-open spaces where talk was sparse and silence ruled.
Siri Hustvedt
#33. Each person does see the world in a different way. There is not a single, unifying, objective truth. We're all limited by our perspective.
Siri Hustvedt
#34. 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
#35. The third-person or 'objective,' static, reductive models used in most science are important and yield significant results, but they have their limitations.
Siri Hustvedt
#36. 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
#37. There is no reason we should expect young children to enter the nocturnal darkness of sleep and dreams without help.
Siri Hustvedt
#38. It can only be that places left behind often become emotionally simplified - that they sound a single note of pain or pleasure, which means that they are never what they were.
Siri Hustvedt
#39. The computer model will be replaced by an organic model, in which the brain-mind is embodied - part of a whole, dynamic, living organism: one driven by emotional forces, not only cognitive ones.
Siri Hustvedt
#40. We are all dying one by one. We all smell of mortality, and we can't wash it off.
Siri Hustvedt
#41. ... Who had read my poems, who held my hand, who was dead before he could visit me in the
hospital where he had been, too, landed, too, on his flights to heaven and drops into hell.
Siri Hustvedt
#42. Flashbacks rarely involve language. Mine certainly didn't. They were visual, motor, and sensory, and they took place in a relentless, horrifying present.
Siri Hustvedt
#43. 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
#44. I liked the streets as much as museums, and I spent hours in the city wandering around, inhaling the garbage.
Siri Hustvedt
#45. We chart delusions through collective agreement.
Siri Hustvedt
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. Reading is perception as translation. The inert signs of an alphabet become living meanings in the mind.
Siri Hustvedt
#49. In that way, I am like my mother. But I fell in love with your mother because she is exactly the opposite. She is deep and thorough and cares only about the questions she keeps trying to answer for herself. The world has little use for people like your mother, but her time will come.
Siri Hustvedt
#50. 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
#51. We sometimes imagine we want what we don't really want.
Siri Hustvedt
#52. 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
#54. Novelists embody plural selves all the time. What are characters, after all, if not other selves?
Siri Hustvedt
#55. If I have open time, and I'm in Manhattan, I'll just walk to wherever I'm going, even if I could get there faster on the subway. I just love walking the streets of New York.
Siri Hustvedt
#56. I'm telling you there are many ways to live and many ways to love. I guess my way is more roundabout than most.
Siri Hustvedt
#57. 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
#58. The stories and pictures I make for the lives of the people closest to me are the forms of my empathy.
Siri Hustvedt
#59. Widowers marry again because it makes their lives easier. Widows often don't, because it makes their lives harder. [p. 61]
Siri Hustvedt
#61. Ego, id, and superego are terms familiar to all, but for many years, Freud's psychoanalytic theory has thrived in English departments around the country as a tool for interpreting literary texts but has rarely, if ever, been discussed in science departments.
Siri Hustvedt
#62. I have suffered from migraines since childhood and have long been curious about my own aching head, my dizziness, my divine lifting feelings, my sparklers and black holes, and my single visual hallucination of a little pink man and a pink ox on the floor of my bedroom.
Siri Hustvedt
#63. I am always suspicious of those who impose 'rules' on child rearing. Every child is different in terms of temperament and learning, and every parent responds to a particular child, not some generalized infant or youngster.
Siri Hustvedt
#64. Creativity has always depended on openness and flexibility, so let us hope for more of both in the future.
Siri Hustvedt
#65. Fiction is not an escape from the world either. Imaginary experience is also experience. O
Siri Hustvedt
#66. Even in fiction, I feel rigorous honesty applies. It doesn't apply to facts; it applies to what I think of as not telling emotional lies, which is a funny business.
Siri Hustvedt
#67. Pain is always emotional. Fear and depression keep constant company with chronic hurting.
Siri Hustvedt
#68. When I don't get enough sleep, I am cranky, vulnerable to headaches, and my concentration is poor.
Siri Hustvedt
#70. Far more women read fiction than men, and because of this, novels have become marginalised as serious texts.
Siri Hustvedt
#71. 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
#72. Because I knew so much about him, because I had been close to him, I couldn't bring the various fragments of my experience with him into a single coherent image. The truth was mobile and contradictory, and I was willing to live with that.
Siri Hustvedt
#73. Chance had given me this small adventure and I was pleased.
Siri Hustvedt
#74. Henry Miller is a famous writer whose work has fallen out of fashion, but I strongly recommend that readers who don't know his work pick up a book and experience this writer's zealous, crazy, inventive, funny, sexy, often delirious prose.
Siri Hustvedt
#75. 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
#76. I enjoy domestic life. Cooking gives me great pleasure, especially if I can chop vegetables slowly and think about what I'm doing and dream a little about this and that.
Siri Hustvedt
#77. All human states are organic brain states - happiness, sadness, fear, lust, dreaming, doing math problems and writing novels - and our brains are not static.
Siri Hustvedt
#78. 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
#79. Scientists have a tendency to believe in absolutes, in studies and the repeating of them. Psychoanalysis is firmly based in subjective accounts. We need both.
Siri Hustvedt
#80. I love making up visual works of art in language. I get to be an artist without actually being an artist in that sense.
Siri Hustvedt
#81. The page can resurrect what's lost and what's dead, what's not there anymore and what was never there.
Siri Hustvedt
#82. I have a longstanding fascination with visual art. I do, in fact, draw as well, as I did in 'The Summer without Men.' I also write essays about visual art.
Siri Hustvedt
#83. Being alive is inexplicable, I thought. Consciousness itself is inexplicable. There is nothing ordinary in the world.
Siri Hustvedt
#84. I have found that all of my memories seem to need a place and that a good part of what we think of as explicit memory has to do with location.
Siri Hustvedt
#85. He was one of those people in New York who was purported to "know everybody". "Knowing everybody" is a phrase that denotes not having many relations with people but having relations with a few people generally thought to be significant and powerful.
Siri Hustvedt
#86. 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
#87. I've come to understand that migraine is a part of the personality. I have migraine troughs. These often follow high productivity. I have a hypo-manic phase, then I'll crash.
Siri Hustvedt
#88. There was a film class in my high school in Northfield, Minnesota, which was very unusual. I saw my first Buster Keaton film there, aged about 15. It made a gigantic impression on me.
Siri Hustvedt
#89. To forget is ordinary. Even people in mourning, distracted by some little happiness, forget the dead.
Siri Hustvedt
#90. Sigmund Freud makes people irritable. Whenever someone mentions Freud, say, at a dinner party, I see eyes roll and listen to the nasty remarks that follow.
Siri Hustvedt
#92. 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
#93. Human beings are repetitive animals. All meaning is generated through repetition.
Siri Hustvedt
#94. It's a language I've come to hate, because it admits no mystery and no ambiguity into its smug vocabulary, which arrogantly suggests that everything can be known.
Siri Hustvedt
#95. We project our feelings onto other people, but there is always a dynamic that creates those inventions. The fantasies are made between people, and the ideas about those people live inside us ... And, even after they die, they are still there. I am made of the dead.
Siri Hustvedt
#96. As one of four daughters, I grew up with an imaginary brother - wondering what it would have been like if one of us had been a boy. There's no question that there was a phantom boy child in my imagination when I was young.
Siri Hustvedt
#97. I found myself fascinated by neuroscience, attended a monthly lecture on brain science at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, and was invited to become a member of a discussion group devoted to a new field: neuropsychoanalysis.
Siri Hustvedt
#98. I was afraid of it, because I liked it. It excited me.
Siri Hustvedt
#99. Do you remember when you told me I had beautiful knees? I never like my knees. In fact, I thought they were ugly. But your eyes have rehabilitated them. Whether I see you again or not, I'm going to live out my life with these two beautiful knees.
Siri Hustvedt
#100. Writing fiction is like remembering what never happened.
Siri Hustvedt
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