Siri Hustvedt Quotes & Sayings

It is true that I suffered in a difficult and stupid love affair and that I worked at one bad job after another to try to keep myself going. Nevertheless, I remember that time as extraordinary, and I wouldn't trade it for anything. I don't even wish now that I had more money. And had I been asked if I was suffering at the time, I would have said a defiant no. — Siri Hustvedt

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

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

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

Libraries are sexual dream factories. The langour brings it on. — Siri Hustvedt

Widowers marry again because it makes their lives easier. Widows often don't, because it makes their lives harder. [p. 61] — Siri Hustvedt

The future is, of course, imaginary - an unreal place that I create from my expectations, which are made from my remembered experiences, especially repeated experiences. — Siri Hustvedt

I imagined Stephen's companion was a beautiful woman. Her form and coloring changed with my moving thoughts, but the idea that she existed remained to nag at me, and even though she was only a spook of my jealousy, I couldn't stop the surge of fantasies about her and Stephen. By the time I left the library, I had invented several elaborate plots involving the two of them. — Siri Hustvedt

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

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

I am married to a writer, and this - writing - is an odd enterprise. It's something we both support very strongly. — Siri Hustvedt

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

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

The page can resurrect what's lost and what's dead, what's not there anymore and what was never there. — Siri Hustvedt

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

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

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

People imagine that hope has degrees, but I think not. There is hope and there is no hope. — Siri Hustvedt

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

My mother said the bizarre name Raccoona had surely been inspired, at least on a subliminal level, by the masks raccoons don't wear but simply have - the ones given them by nature ... [S]he pointed out that Le Guin had suspected all along that Raccoona and Tiptree were two authors that came from the same source, but in a letter to Alice she wrote that she preferred Tiptree to Raccoona: 'Raccoona, I think, has less control, thus less wit and power.'
Le Guin, Mother said, had understood something deep. 'When you take on a male persona, something happens.'
When I asked her what that was, she sat back in her chair, waved her arm, and smiled. 'You get to be the father. — Siri Hustvedt

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

Distortion is part of desire. We always change the things we want. — Siri Hustvedt

All I can say is that every time I'm with him, she's there. She walks through every game I play with him. She whispers behind me every time I talk to him. When we draw, she's there. When we build blocks, she's there. When I scold him, she's there. Whenever I look up, she's there. — Siri Hustvedt

Doesn't the seventeenth-century use of the measurement yard for penis strike you as a bit of an exaggeration, unless the yard then was not the yard now? — Siri Hustvedt

It encapsulates so neatly the lesson of expectation and reality that it could serve as a parable. The fact that tomatoes are good is beside the point. If you think you're getting an apple, a tomato will revolt you. That New York should be nicknamed the Big Apple, that an apple is the fruit of humankind's first error and the expulsion from paradise, that America and paradise have been linked and confused ever since Europeans first hit its shores, makes the story reverberate as myth. — Siri Hustvedt

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

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

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

But all attractions are alike,' he said. 'They come from an emptiness inside.' He hammered on this chest with his index finger. 'Something's missing and you have to fill it. Books, paintings, people, they're all the same...'
'A lot of people do without books and paintings.'
'True,' he said, 'but that doesn't affect the argument.' Paris turned his head to one side and chewed on his lip. 'Of course, nothing ever does the trick. Nobody's really satisfied for long. — Siri Hustvedt

Great books are the ones that are urgent, life-changing, the ones that crack open the reader's skull and heart. — Siri Hustvedt

There is no future without a past, because what is to be cannot be imagined except as a form of repetition. — Siri Hustvedt

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

It's odd the way life works, the way it mutates and wanders, the way one thing becomes another. — Siri Hustvedt

I don't know why you are better and more beautiful than anybody else. — Siri Hustvedt

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

I was 13 when I had my first bout of insomnia. My family was in Reykjavik, Iceland, for the summer, and day never really became night. — Siri Hustvedt

I was happy without having sought happiness. — Siri Hustvedt

Sometimes even now I think I see him in the street or standing in a window or bent over a book in a coffee shop. And in that instant, before I understand that it's someone else, my lungs tighten and I lose my breath. — Siri Hustvedt

Dreaming is another form of thinking, more concrete, more economical, more visual, and often more emotional than the thoughts of the day, but a thinking through of the day, nevertheless. — Siri Hustvedt

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

Old places fire the internal weather of our pasts. The mild winds, aching calms, and hard storms of forgotten emotions return to us when we return to the spots where they happened. — Siri Hustvedt

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

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

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

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

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

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

It seems to me that going backward sometimes means going forward. — Siri Hustvedt

Perception plays a vital role in the diagnosis of bipolar illness. Symptoms are perceived through the categories of psychiatric medicine at a given moment in history, categories which are continually shifting and being named or renamed. — Siri Hustvedt

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

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

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

It has taken me a very long time, a very long time to give myself permission to fly and breathe fire. — Siri Hustvedt

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

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

I loved it so much I was sorry to finish it. I closed the book and shocked myself by thinking, This is better than life. I didn't mean or want to think this, but I'm afraid I did. Certainly this feeling about a book is the one that makes people want to write. I don't know why I feel more alive when I write, but I do. — Siri Hustvedt

But don't you think that everybody is finally the same in the most essential ways? Some lives are probably much duller than others, but it's impossible to know how people live inside themselves, isn't it? I mean, a life could seem boring on the outside and be tumultuous within. Isn't cruelty more contemptible than ordinariness? — Siri Hustvedt

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

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

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

Very simply, for the mind, absence can be a catalyst for presence. — Siri Hustvedt

The second anniversary opened an internal crack in Sonia, a fissure through which she released the explosive feeling that had horrified her for two years. The conflagration that had burned so many, that had pushed people into the open air, onto the ledges from which they jumped, some of them on fire, had left its unspeakable images inside my niece ... Sonia didn't want a world in which buildings fell down and wars were fought for no reason. — Siri Hustvedt

And the pen, as it were, Dear Reader, is now in my hand, and I am claiming the advantage, taking it for myself, for you will notice that the written word hides the body of the one who writes. For all you know, I might be a MAN in disguise. Unlikely, you say, with all this feminist prattle flying out here and there and everywhere, but can you be sure? — Siri Hustvedt

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

When I don't get enough sleep, I am cranky, vulnerable to headaches, and my concentration is poor. — Siri Hustvedt

I garden. It's very relaxing to me. — Siri Hustvedt

Correlation is not cause, it is just a 'music of chance'. — Siri Hustvedt

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

If not violently overthrown, expectation can have a power in itself, can invest a place with what literally isn't there. — Siri Hustvedt

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

The very next day, we were told that Abigail had had a massive stroke. She was alive, but the woman we had known had vanished. She did not know where she was or who she was. The alarm clock had gone off. The very old languish and die. We know that, buy the very old know it far better than the rest of us. They live in a world of continual loss and this, as my mother had said, is bitter. [p. 172] — Siri Hustvedt

There's a phenomenology of being sick, one that depends on temperament, personal history, and the culture which we live in. — Siri Hustvedt

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

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

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

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

The idea that skiing might not be fun, might not be for everyone, had never occurred to me. Where I come from, the sport signified pleasure, nature, family happiness. — Siri Hustvedt

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

I've come to think of consciousness as a continuum of states, from fully awake cogitation to daydreaming to the altered consciousness of hallucinations and dreams. Still, interpreting dreams can only take place when we're awake. I believe meaning is what the mind makes and wants. It's essential to perception and to consciousness in all its forms. But the important meanings of psychotherapy are subjective. There's a lot of research that confirms that drem content reflects the dreamer's emotional conflicts. — Siri Hustvedt

I continue to write essays about art. The visual is always part of my work, and it gives me immense pleasure to make up the words of art and create them verbally rather than build them. — Siri Hustvedt

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

Forgetting," I said, "is probably as much a part of life as remembering. We're all amnesiacs. — Siri Hustvedt

I bought myself a rubber brain, familiarized myself with its many parts, listened intently, and read more. In fact, I read obsessively, as my husband has told me repeatedly. He has even suggested that my rapacious reading resembles an addiction. — Siri Hustvedt

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

We all start out the same in our mothers' wombs. We, all of us, when floating in the amniotic sea of our earliest oblivion, have gonads. If the Y chromosome didn't swoop in to act on the gonads of some of us and make testes, we would all become women. In biology, the Genesis story is reversed: Adam becomes Adam out of Eve, not the other way around. — Siri Hustvedt

Do you know that I can't remember her face? Try as I may, it will not be conjured. I can tell you what she looked like; I can recite a description of her features, part by part, but I cannot evoke the whole face.'
'Don't you have a photograph?'
'Photographs!' He spat out the word. 'I'm talking about true recollection - seeing the face. — Siri Hustvedt

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

I had no friends. Was I happy? I was wildly happy. Sitting on my bed, which took up most of the space in that narrow room, I whispered prayers of thanks that I was really and truly here in New York, beginning another life. I worshipped the place. I feasted on every beautiful inch of it - the crowds, the fruit and vegetable stands, the miles of pavement, the graffiti, even the garbage. All of it sent me into paroxysms of joy. Needless to say, my elevation had an irrational cast to it. Had I not arrived laden with ideas of urban paradise, I might have felt bad losing sleep, might have felt lonely and disoriented, but instead I walked around town like a love-struck idiot, inhaling the difference between there and here. — Siri Hustvedt

Like countless first-year medical students, immersed in the symptoms of one disease after another, I am alert to the tingles and pangs, the throbs and quivers of my mortal body, each one of which is potentially a sign of the end. — Siri Hustvedt

I watched 'Holiday' in college, and that was when I had my first fantasy of being Katharine Hepburn, standing at the top of the staircase in a huge Hollywood mansion. — Siri Hustvedt

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

The bottle of red brush on a white table gleamed throughout the remaining years of my childhood as the sign of what was possible there. — Siri Hustvedt

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

None of us is immune to suggestion. We are social beings and live in a social world. — Siri Hustvedt

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

I was glib, even witty, or at least that's how I imagined myself. — Siri Hustvedt

You really believe that there are subjects that shouldn't be photographed?' George said. He spoke evenly and softly.
'Maybe I do,' I said, thinking aloud.
'You believe in censorship then,' said Stephen.
I looked up at Stephen. His face was tight, combative. 'Not censorship,' I said slowly. 'That's external. I mean control from the inside. After all, pictures can lie, too, can convey falseness rather than truth. — Siri Hustvedt

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

But we all live there, I thought to myself, in the imaginary stories we tell ourselves about our lives. — Siri Hustvedt

I remembered that time of life when most of what matters can be summed up by the phase 'the other kids,' and it struck me as pitiful. The dread was more complex ... Dread is a lure, and I cold feel its tug, but why? ... Perception is never passive. We are not only receivers of the world; we also actively produce it. There is a hallucinatory quality to all perception, and illusions are easy to create. [pp. 656-66] — Siri Hustvedt