Siri Hustvedt Quotes

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

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.

Our brain and our whole nervous system and our whole body are only created in relation to other people and to the environment. So what we have here is an enormously complex notion of both consciousness and unconsciousness. That's why these models get very difficult, because you can't reduce our subjective and intersubjective experience to neural reductions.

We chart delusions through collective agreement.

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.

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.

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.

All human states are organic brain states - happiness, sadness, fear, lust, dreaming, doing math problems and writing novels - and our brains are not static.

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.

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

The old story is true:Women have to be less emotional than men.

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.

Women really are not supposed to be imaginative. That creativity of this kind is supposed to belong to men. You know, because women make babies. I find the double standards shocking.

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.

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.

Men generally do not see women as competition.

No matter how brilliant or accomplished they are, there is something emasculating for men in being pitted against a woman. It is even more true in creative fields already considered to be "squishy" and feminine, and it's a big problem because great women have been left off the record.

Memory changes as a person matures.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

After years of having immersed myself in science, I do think that if you master several different ways of thinking, it makes your own thought processes more agile.

Every sickness has an alien quality, a feeling of invasion and loss of control that is evident in the language we use about it.

We sometimes imagine we want what we don't really want.

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

Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.

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.

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.

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

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

I think that it's important for people to read philosophy and literature is not because I think everyone should be a well-rounded human being, but because it will help you think better about what you are doing.

Depression is when you think there's nothing to be done. Fortunately I always think there's something to be done.

Good books, written by men or women, are ones in which you lose consciousness of the person writing the sentences.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

I myself have perceived women's actions as more aggressive than I would have in men because I too am walking around with my own biases. The way to fight them is to become conscious of them.

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]