Top 100 Siri Hustvedt Quotes
#1. The brain-mind is not a computer, and regarding it as one has led to a variety of theoretical dead ends.
Siri Hustvedt
#2. 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
#3. We cannot wish our worlds into being. Much depends on chance, on what we can't control, on others.
Siri Hustvedt
#4. Neurobiological research has shown that in people with chronic PTSD, both stress hormone secretion and areas of the brain connected to memory function, such as the hippocampus, appear to be affected, although exactly how and why remains controversial.
Siri Hustvedt
#5. I had no destination, just the will to go, and I went fast.
Siri Hustvedt
#6. Immigration inevitably involves error and revision. What I imagined it would be, it's not. For better or worse, some mistake is unavoidable.
Siri Hustvedt
#7. The history of fiction is about family - an inexhaustible subject for literature. We are creatures driven by emotions that are on high display in intimate relations - inside the family.
Siri Hustvedt
#8. Loss.
A known absence.
If you didn't know it,
it would be nothing,
which it is, of course,
a nothing of another kind,
as acutely felt as a blister,
but a tumult, too,
in the region of the heart and lungs,
an emptiness with a name: You
Siri Hustvedt
#9. Most of us accept that although we may believe our dreams to be real events, upon waking, we can tell the difference between nocturnal hallucinations and reality.
Siri Hustvedt
#10. In this early memory he looks different from the way I would remember him later.
Siri Hustvedt
#11. 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
#12. In effect, painting is the still memory of [the artist's] human motion, and our individual responses to it depend on who we are, on our character, which underlines the simple truth that no person leaves himself behind in order to look at a painting.
Siri Hustvedt
#13. Bedtime rituals for children ease the way to the elsewhere of slumber - teeth brushing and pajamas, the voice of a parent reading, the feel and smell of the old blanket or toy, the nightlight glowing in a corner.
Siri Hustvedt
#14. I will turn human anatomy into roses and stars and sea. I will dissect the beloveds body in metaphor.
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. Memory offers up its gifts only when jogged by something in the present. It isn't a storehouse of fixed images and words, but a dynamic associative network in the brain that is never quiet and is subject to revision each time we retrieve an old picture or old words.
Siri Hustvedt
#17. The mind-brain is lived only from a first-person perspective, and it is a dynamic, plastic organ that changes in relation to the environment.
Siri Hustvedt
#18. It seems to me that going backward sometimes means going forward.
Siri Hustvedt
#19. No one rejoices more in revenge than women, wrote Juvenal. Women do most delight in revenge, wrote Sir Thomas Browne. Sweet is revenge, especially to women, wrote Lord Byron. And I say, I wonder why, boys. I wonder why.
Siri Hustvedt
#20. Mostly the same, but different in parts, mostly in those lower begetting and bearing parts? Or different in kind?
Siri Hustvedt
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. I wonder now whether it isn't dangerous to assign significance to that which is essentially vacant, but we can't seem to avoid it. We cover up the holes with our speech, explaining away the emptiness until we forget it is there.
Siri Hustvedt
#25. There's a phenomenology of being sick, one that depends on temperament, personal history, and the culture which we live in.
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. The history of art is full of women lying around naked for erotic consumption by men.
Siri Hustvedt
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. It has taken me a very long time, a very long time to give myself permission to fly and breathe fire.
Siri Hustvedt
#31. Being a mother is complicated because it's not just a paternal culture making demands on you; it's those internal demands and expectations that women have and are self-generated.
Siri Hustvedt
#32. 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
#33. Years ago, when I was in Siena for the first time, I saw the works of Duccio, whose deeply emotional painting from the thirteenth century has never left me.
Siri Hustvedt
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. People who grow up with two or more languages understand that each can express certain aspects of reality better than the other.
Siri Hustvedt
#37. 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
#38. 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
#40. Worries about the power of a doctor's suggestions to influence and shape his patient's mind, whether they are made under hypnosis or not, are still with us.
Siri Hustvedt
#41. Six months isn't such a long time. That's how long it's been since I came to see you in May, but the fact is it's been much longer than that. We've spent years living inside each other.
Siri Hustvedt
#42. The very idea of a library for me is bound to my mother and father and includes the history of my own metamorphosis through books, fictions that are no less part of me than much of my own history.
Siri Hustvedt
#43. Desire is the engine of life, the yearning that goads us forward with stops along the way, but it has no destination, no final stop, except death.
Siri Hustvedt
#44. Great books are the ones that are urgent, life-changing, the ones that crack open the reader's skull and heart.
Siri Hustvedt
#45. In sleep, we leave behind the sensory stimulation of the outside world.
Siri Hustvedt
#46. There is no future without a past, because what is to be cannot be imagined except as a form of repetition.
Siri Hustvedt
#47. It's odd the way life works, the way it mutates and wanders, the way one thing becomes another.
Siri Hustvedt
#48. 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
#49. There are tragedies and there are comedies, aren't there? And they are often more the same than different, rather like men and women, if you ask me. A comedy depends on stopping the story at exactly the right moment.
Siri Hustvedt
#50. I was glib, even witty, or at least that's how I imagined myself.
Siri Hustvedt
#51. ...I often thought of our marriage as one long conversation.
Siri Hustvedt
#52. 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
#53. Every reader writes the book he or she reads, supplying what isn't there, and that creative invention becomes the book.
Siri Hustvedt
#54. I have a tendency to face my bad fantasies in my books.
Siri Hustvedt
#55. Crippled and crazy, we hobble toward the finish line, pen in hand.
Siri Hustvedt
#56. I am not a physician, but I am deeply interested in diagnostic categories and have read extensively in the history of the subject.
Siri Hustvedt
#57. I was walking home from the library on Broadway, and I remember that the street looked different to me, very clear and beautiful, and I felt incredibly happy. I even said to myself, 'I've never been happier than I am now.
Siri Hustvedt
#58. 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
#59. Writing isn't a job so much as a compulsion. I've been writing since I was very young because for some strange reason, I must write, and also because when I write, I feel more alive and closer to the world than when I'm not writing.
Siri Hustvedt
#60. Intellectual curiosity about one's own illness is certainly born of a desire for mastery. If I couldn't cure myself, perhaps I could at least begin to understand myself.
Siri Hustvedt
#61. My parents were gigantic influences on me. I had a deep hunger to impress my father, who was a professor and an intellectual. I wanted his approval.
Siri Hustvedt
#62. Infancy is irretrievable. Its memories live underground. To what extent they return by stealth or are triggered by various catalysts remains an ongoing question.
Siri Hustvedt
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. Only time will tell in what ways Freud was prescient and in what ways he failed to understand how the mind functions. For example, no scientist and very few psychoanalysts still embrace Freud's death instinct.
Siri Hustvedt
#66. There is no perception without memory. But good art surprise us. Good art reorients our expectations, forces us to break the pattern, to see in a new way.
Siri Hustvedt
#67. People can't help what they feel. It's what they do that counts
Siri Hustvedt
#68. Transformation of the self are related to where you are, and identity Is dependent on others.
Siri Hustvedt
#69. Every time I finish a book, I say to an imaginary god that I do not believe in, 'Please let me live to write another one.'
Siri Hustvedt
#70. Memory is essential to who we are, and memories can be both implicit and explicit - unconscious and conscious.
Siri Hustvedt
#71. If something's not working, it's wonderful to have a reader you can trust to say, 'Actually, you've gone off the deep end here'.
Siri Hustvedt
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. We waste those eggs like crazy, of course, flushing them out every month in days of bleeding, but then most sperm are wholly useless as well, a thought to be considered elsewhere at greater length.
Siri Hustvedt
#75. But spectacular lies don't need to be perfect. They rely less on the liar's skill than on the listener's expectations and wishes. After Mark's dishonesty was exposed, I understood how much I wised that what he had told me had been true.
Siri Hustvedt
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. Libraries are sexual dream factories. The langour brings it on.
Siri Hustvedt
#79. I am married to a writer, and this - writing - is an odd enterprise. It's something we both support very strongly.
Siri Hustvedt
#80. Hysteria is something that I've been interested for a very long time. I thought I might have it, but it seems that it's unlikely.
Siri Hustvedt
#81. I am an American, but a sense of otherness was part of my growing up. I spoke Norwegian before I spoke English. My mother is Norwegian.
Siri Hustvedt
#82. The faculty of memory cannot be separated from the imagination. They go hand in hand. To one degree or another, we all invent our personal pasts. And for most of us those pasts are built from emotionally colored memories.
Siri Hustvedt
#83. I saw Joseph Cornell's lyrical work for the first time at the Museum of Modern Art in the late seventies and have internalized many of his boxes.
Siri Hustvedt
#84. 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
#85. Although sometimes the morbid is also the transcendent, the transcendent cannot be reduced to the morbid.
Siri Hustvedt
#86. Drowning, she clung fiercely to that small, splintered piece of mast bobbing in the ocean we call justice. There is no justice, of course, or very little of it, and counting on it as a life raft is a big mistake.
Siri Hustvedt
#87. I like 'nerves'! I like the word 'migraineur'. I like the word 'madness'. These are OK words. The 19th century had a very handy term: 'neurasthenic'. I think that's a very useful word. We all know what that means: it means extra-sensitive.
Siri Hustvedt
#88. 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
#89. People imagine that hope has degrees, but I think not. There is hope and there is no hope.
Siri Hustvedt
#90. A sense that even if every scrap of a life were saved, thrown into a giant mound and then carefully sifted to extract all possible meaning, it would not add up to a life.
Siri Hustvedt
#91. Insanity is a state of profound self-absorption.
Siri Hustvedt
#92. Reading is a private pursuit; one that takes place behind closed doors.
Siri Hustvedt
#93. I listened to the whine in my voice with a detached fascination. It was a false question. No answer would have pacified me. I had simply given in to a perverse need to ask, to expose and torment myself, and as soon as I heard the words, I experienced both relief and humiliation.
Siri Hustvedt
#94. Correlation is not cause, it is just a 'music of chance'.
Siri Hustvedt
#95. Children are not in a position to assess risk and safety; it must be done for them, and it must be done carefully.
Siri Hustvedt
#96. Every time the DSM prepares for a new edition, there are countless groups lobbying to get their particular mental illness recognized by the diagnostic manual. Surely, this is a social and cultural phenomenon.
Siri Hustvedt
#97. 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
#98. It's not as if I've been unlucky. My books have been published and reviewed. I haven't lived through terrible literary suffering!
Siri Hustvedt
#99. Writers are in control of editing processes - making a sentence better, cutting out a paragraph. But the initial outpouring has very little to do with conscious control or manipulation.
Siri Hustvedt
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