Siri Hustvedt > Quotes

“I don't want the words to be naked the way they are in faxes or in the computer. I want them to be covered by an envelope that you have to rip open in order to get at. I want there to be a waiting time -a pause between the writing and the reading. I want us to be careful about what we say to each other. I want the miles between us to be real and long. This will be our law -that we write our dailiness and our suffering very, very carefully.”
― Siri Hustvedt, What I Loved

“Every sickness has an alien quality, a feeling of invasion and loss of control that is evident in the language we use about it.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Shaking Woman, or A History of My Nerves

“There is no future without a past, because what is to be cannot be imagined except as a form of repetition.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Summer Without Men

“Pain is always emotional. Fear and depression keep constant company with chronic hurting.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Shaking Woman, or A History of My Nerves

“I will turn human anatomy into roses and stars and sea. I will dissect the beloveds body in metaphor.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Summer Without Men

“A book is a collaboration between the one who reads and what is read and, at its best, that coming together is a love story like any other.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Summer Without Men

“Reading is a private pursuit; one that takes place behind closed doors.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Summer Without Men

“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

“Some of us are fated to live in a box from which there is only temporary release. We of the damned-up spirits, of the thwarted feelings, of the blocked hearts, and the pent-up thoughts, we who long to blast out, flood forth in a torrent of rage or joy or even madness, but there is nowhere for us to go, nowhere in the world because no one will have us as we are, and there is nothing to do except to embrace the secret pleasures of our sublimations, the arc of a sentence, the kiss of a rhyme, the image that forms on paper or canvas, the inner cantata, the cloistered embroidery, the dark and dreaming needlepoint from hell or heaven or purgatory or none of those three, but there must be some sound and fury from us, some clashing cymbals in the void.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Summer Without Men

“Dreams are stories made by and for the dreamer, and each dreamer has his own folds to open and knots to untie.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Shaking Woman, or A History of My Nerves

“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, The Shaking Woman, or A History of My Nerves

“The recollections of an older man are different from those of a younger man. What seemed vital at forty may lose its significance at seventy. We manufacture stories, after all, from the fleeting sensory material that bombards us at every instant, a fragmented series of pictures, conversations, odors, and the touch of things and people. We delete most of it to live with some semblance of order, and the reshuffling of memory goes on until we die.”
― Siri Hustvedt, What I Loved

“I've always thought of wholeness and integration as necessary myths. We're fragmented beings who cement ourselves together, but there are always cracks. Living with the cracks is part of being, well, reasonably healthy”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Sorrows of an American

“Time is not outside us, but inside. Only we live with past, present, and future, and the present is too brief to experience anyway; it is retained afterward and then it is either codified or it slips into amnesia.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Summer Without Men

“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, What I Loved

“I've always thought that love thrives on a certain kind of distance, that it requires an awed separateness to continue. Without that necessary remove, the physical minutiae of the other person grows ugly in its magnification.”
― Siri Hustvedt, What I Loved

“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

“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, The Sorrows of an American

“That is the strangeness of language: it crosses the boundaries of the body, is at once inside and outside, and it sometimes happens that we don't notice the threshold has been crossed.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Sorrows of an American

“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, The Sorrows of an American

“Memory changes as a person matures.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Shaking Woman, or A History of My Nerves

“We are all dying one by one. We all smell of mortality, and we can't wash it off.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Summer Without Men

“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, The Summer Without Men

“We must all allow ourselves the fantasy of projection from time to time, a chance to clothe ourselves in the imaginary gowns and tails of what has never been and never will be. This gives some polish to our tarnished lives, and sometimes we may choose one dream over another, and in the choosing find some respite from ordinary sadness. After all, we, none of us, can ever untangle the knot of fictions that make up that wobbly thing we call a self.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Summer Without Men

“Reading is perception as translation. The inert signs of an alphabet become living meanings in the mind.”
― Siri Hustvedt, Living, Thinking, Looking: Essays

“Escribir es un modo de localizar mi hambre, y el hambre no es sino un vacío.”
― Siri Hustvedt, What I Loved

“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, The Shaking Woman, or A History of My Nerves

“Great books are the ones that are urgent, life-changing, the ones that crack open the reader’s skull and heart.”
― Siri Hustvedt

“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

“Lots of women read fiction. Most men don't. Women read fiction written by women and by men. Most men don't. If a man opens a novel,. he likes to have a masculine name on the cover; it's reassuring somehow. You never know what might happen to that external genitalia if you immerse yourself in imaginary doings concocted by someone with the goods on the inside.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Summer Without Men