Siri Hustvedt famous quotes

Every painting is always two paintings: The one you see, and the one you remember.
-- Siri Hustvedt

#Two #Remember #Painting

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

#Book #Together #Collaboration

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

#Body #Language #Sometimes

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

#Past #Reflection #Form

Dreams are stories made by and for the dreamer, and each dreamer has his own folds to open and knots to untie.
-- Siri Hustvedt

#Dream #Stories #Knots

I've always thought of wholeness and integration as necessary myths. We're gragmented beings who cement ourselves together, but there are always cracks. Living with the cracks is part of being, well, reasonably healthy.
-- Siri Hustvedt

#Healthy #Together #Cracks

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

#Loss #Feelings #Quality

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

#Memories #Syntax #Coherence

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

#Memories #Past #Hands

Memory changes as a person matures.
-- Siri Hustvedt

#Memories #Persons

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

#Fall #Thinking #Our Words

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

#Order #Personality #Intellectual

I will turn human anatomy into roses and stars and sea. I will dissect the beloveds body in metaphor.
-- Siri Hustvedt

#Stars #Sea #Rose

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

#Memories #Brain #Revision

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

#Life Changing #Book #Heart

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

#Sick #Phenomenology #Culture

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

#Fiction #Imagine #Terrible

We sometimes imagine we want what we don't really want.
-- Siri Hustvedt

#Want #Sometimes #Imagine

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

#Past #Past Present And Future #Amnesia

Reading is perception as translation. The inert signs of an alphabet become living meanings in the mind.
-- Siri Hustvedt

#Reading #Mind #Perception

Reading is a private pursuit; one that takes place behind closed doors.
-- Siri Hustvedt

#Reading #Doors #Pursuit

Ture stories can't be told forward, only backward. We invent them from the vantage point of an ever-changing present and tell ourselves how they unfolded.
-- Siri Hustvedt

#Stories #Vantage Point

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

#Regret #Night #Facts

Memory is essential to who we are, and memories can be both implicit and explicit - unconscious and conscious.
-- Siri Hustvedt

#Memories #Who We Are #Essentials

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

#Couple #Sadness #Night

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

#Hurt #Pain #Emotional

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

#Eye #Mind #Brain

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

#Real #Rip #Reading

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

#Memories #Character #Simple

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

#Years #Body #Disease

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

#Curiosity #Intellectual #Desire

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

#Animal #Repetition #Humans

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

#Dream #Sadness #Writing

There is no reason we should expect young children to enter the nocturnal darkness of sleep and dreams without help.
-- Siri Hustvedt

#Dream #Children #Sleep

There is this assumption that much of what I write is about my life, and that simply is not true.
-- Siri Hustvedt

#Writing #Assumption

Being a mother is complicated because its not just a paternal culture making demands on you; its those internal demands and expectations that women have and are self-generated.
-- Siri Hustvedt

#Mother #Self #Expectations

Dreams are stories made by and for the dreamer...
-- Siri Hustvedt

#Dream #Dreamer #Stories

Writing fiction is like remembering what never happened.
-- Siri Hustvedt

#Writing #Fiction #Remember

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

#Dream #Emotional #Thinking

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

#Memories #Men #Order

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

#Widows #Easier #Harder

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

#Dream #Library #Factories

Not telling is just as interesting as telling I have found. Why speech, that short verbal journey from inside to outside can be excrutiating under certain circumstances is fascinating.
-- Siri Hustvedt

#Journey #Interesting #Speech

We chart delusions through collective agreement.
-- Siri Hustvedt

#Agreement #Delusion #Collectives

The fictive is an emormous territory it turns out, its boundaries vague, and there is little certainty about where it begins and ends.
-- Siri Hustvedt

#Littles #Territory #Boundaries

The logic: Reading is a private pursuit, one that often takes place behind closed doors. A young lady might retreat with a book, might even take it into her boudoir, and there, reclining on here silken sheets, imbibing the thrills and chills manufactured by writerly quills, one of her hands, one not absolutely needed to grip the little volume, might wander. The fear, in short, as one-handed reading. [p. 146]
-- Siri Hustvedt

#Book #Reading #Doors

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

#Causes #Chance

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

#Children #Reading #Glowing