Hustvedt Siri Quotes & Sayings

People can't help what they feel. It's what they do that counts — Siri Hustvedt

Pain is always emotional. Fear and depression keep constant company with chronic hurting. — Siri Hustvedt

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

Rage has such focus. It can't go on forever, but it's invigorating. — 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

Writing fiction is like remembering what never happened. — 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

The stories and pictures I make for the lives of the people closest to me are the forms of my empathy. — Siri Hustvedt

We had been pulled apart by absence, but that same absence had shackled us together for life. — 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 am married to a writer, and this - writing - is an odd enterprise. It's something we both support very strongly. — Siri Hustvedt

I knew I wanted to be a writer at 13. Before that, I told everyone I was going to be an artist. — 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

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

There are no rules in art. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

His was an illness that besets the intellectual: the indefatigable will to mastery. Chronic and incurable, it afflicts those who lust after a world that makes sense. — Siri Hustvedt

Maybe the world isn't enough, or maybe the distinction between the world and fiction is not so clear. Fiction is made from the stuff of the world, after all, which includes dreams and wishes and fantasies and memory. And it is never really made alone, but from the material between and among us: language. — Siri Hustvedt

Human beings are repetitive animals. All meaning is generated through repetition. — Siri Hustvedt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An infant no more than six weeks old
a person in the still floppy, stunned by visual stimuli, sucking, arm and foot waving, grunting, grimacing phase of life. How I had loved that stage in my own Daisy's path of becoming. [p.46] — Siri Hustvedt

I have begun to wonder what actually happens in our brains when we return to half-remembered places. What is memory's perspective? Does the man revise the boy's view or is the imprint relatively static, a vestige of what was once intimately known? — Siri Hustvedt

We drank coffee. We talked. She loved Charles Dickens, whom she read in Norwegian. Years after she was dead, I wrote a dissertation on Dickens, and though my study of the great man would no doubt have alarmed her, I had a funny feeling that by taking on the English novelist I was returning to my Norwegian roots. — Siri Hustvedt

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

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

To forget is ordinary. Even people in mourning, distracted by some little happiness, forget the dead. — Siri Hustvedt

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

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

We live in a culture that is much happier talking about organic brain disease than about psychic illness because the former suggests that something that is physically wrong in a brain is wholly unrelated to that person's upbringing or experiences in the world, but that is not necessarily true. — 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

I have a tendency to face my bad fantasies in my books. — Siri Hustvedt

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

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

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

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

Sigmund Freud was very much a creature of his time. He did not 'invent' the unconscious. — Siri Hustvedt

the spectator is the true vanishing point — 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 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

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

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

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

That's one of the great lies of intimacy, to pretend you know everything - you cannot. No matter how close you've been, over however many years, there remain secrets. I think we all know that - that you don't tell everybody everything. — Siri Hustvedt

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

In sleep, we leave behind the sensory stimulation of the outside world. — Siri Hustvedt

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

My purely practical advice: Don't get excited. Don't raise your voice. Bite back. Bite back hard, but never cry. — Siri Hustvedt

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

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 often thought of our marriage as one long conversation. — Siri Hustvedt

When I was an impoverished graduate student, I would sometimes spend $20 or $30 on a T-shirt or accessory I didn't need or even particularly want. What I craved was the purchase, not the thing itself. Of course, a sense of not being deprived may fill an emotional void without ruinous consequences. — Siri Hustvedt

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

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

When dailiness enters memory, repetition fixes places in the mind, but it also burdens them with a wealth of experience that is often difficult to untangle. — Siri Hustvedt

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

It's almost too perfect - the poster girl for an illness in the early days of photography sees the world in black and white. — Siri Hustvedt

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

My memory of the school building itself, its rooms and lockers, blackboards, and hallways, bring on a heavy, oppressive feeling. Whether I was more unhappy in school than any of my friends I don't know. I never would have said I didn't like school, and there are moments I distinctly remember enjoying, but these truths don't alter my memory of that place. — Siri Hustvedt

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

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

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

Far more women read fiction than men, and because of this, novels have become marginalised as serious texts. — 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

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

Artists are cannibals. We consume other artists, and they become part of us - flesh and bone - only to be spewed out again in our own works. — Siri Hustvedt

The genius of women has always been easy to discount, suppress, or attribute to the nearest man. When — 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

Despite my efforts, I was something less than a model student, subject to passionate eruptions in class and wild excursions into related topics. At home I rehearsed calm deliveries, practiced lowering my voice to make it sound authoritative and cool, but in the heat of the moment, I would always forget. — Siri Hustvedt

In this early memory he looks different from the way I would remember him later. — Siri Hustvedt

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

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

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

I had read my way not to knowledge but into an inscrutable oblivion. — Siri Hustvedt

It appears that time has turned that young woman, who imagined herself a romantic heroine, into something of a comic character, but I remain fond of her. We are relatives, after all. — Siri Hustvedt

Walking across campus made me feel sad, and I thought to myself, I wasn't happy there. Then, after reading, we walked past Butler Library. It was dark, but the light inside illuminated the windows. Students were reading and working, and those lit windows gave me a wonderful, weightless feeling. I understood for the first time how happy I had been there - in the library. — Siri Hustvedt

Having children is one of the most passionate and involving bits of business in human life. — 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

Memory changes as a person matures. — Siri Hustvedt