Siri Hustvedt quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Siri Hustvedt

Siri Hustvedt Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Siri Hustvedt on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

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

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

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.

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

Being alive is inexplicable, I thought. Consciousness itself is inexplicable. There is nothing ordinary in the world.

Every mental state is also physical.

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

It seems to me that going backward sometimes means going forward.

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

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.

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.

His sense of duty, honor, rectitude. What made me want to scream one day could make me proud the next.

Insanity is a state of profound self-absorption.

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

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

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.

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.

I am not a physician, but I am deeply interested in diagnostic categories and have read extensively in the history of the subject.

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.

Only the unprotected self can feel joy.

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

I published my first poem in 'The Paris Review' in 1980.

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

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

Creativity has always depended on openness and flexibility, so let us hope for more of both in the future.

The mind-brain is lived only from a first-person perspective, and it is a dynamic, plastic organ that changes in relation to the environment.

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

There are no rules in art.

My greatest pleasure is spending time with my family: my husband and daughter, but also my mother, my three sisters, and their families.

Transformation of the self are related to where you are, and identity Is dependent on others.

Mostly the same, but different in parts, mostly in those lower begetting and bearing parts? Or different in kind?

Immigration inevitably involves error and revision. What I imagined it would be, it's not. For better or worse, some mistake is unavoidable.

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

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

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

The relationship between the imagined and the real is more complicated than people imagine.

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.

I love making up visual works of art in language. I get to be an artist without actually being an artist in that sense.

The history of art is full of women lying around naked for erotic consumption by men.

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

What she remembered is undoubtedly something so radically different from the image I gave to her memory that the two may be incompatible.

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

Although sometimes the morbid is also the transcendent, the transcendent cannot be reduced to the morbid.

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

Our great cultural error is to assume that 'truth' arrives only through reductive theories.

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.

People who grow up with two or more languages understand that each can express certain aspects of reality better than the other.

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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'.

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.

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.

I was happy without having sought happiness.

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

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

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

I garden. It's very relaxing to me.

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

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

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

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

We all live in a culture that is continually isolating feminine and masculine aspects, even when they're not related to people.

Like most people confined to an institution, she had been divested of a past life.

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

...I often thought of our marriage as one long conversation.

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.

She sat in silence on a chair looking over him, content with the fullness of her own thoughts.

Chance had given me this small adventure and I was pleased.

I had no destination, just the will to go, and I went fast.

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

Libraries are sexual dream factories. The langour brings it on.

Writing fiction is like remembering what never happened.

I often felt the girls' speech was interchangeable, without any individuality whatsoever, a kind of herd-speak they had all agreed upon ... [p. 48]

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

We had been pulled apart by absence, but that same absence had shackled us together for life.

I was afraid of it, because I liked it. It excited me.

I am an American, but a sense of otherness was part of my growing up. I spoke Norwegian before I spoke English. My mother is Norwegian.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I suppose we are all products of our parents' joy and suffering. Their emotions are written into us, as much as the inscriptions made by their genes.

Accumulated experience always alters perception of the past.

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

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

The distance needed for humor is always missing from dreams.

It is not that there is no difference between men and women; it is how much difference that difference makes, and how we choose to frame it.

We cannot wish our worlds into being. Much depends on chance, on what we can't control, on others.

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.

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

We chart delusions through collective agreement.

It's not as if I've been unlucky. My books have been published and reviewed. I haven't lived through terrible literary suffering!

Every time I finish a book, I say to an imaginary god that I do not believe in, 'Please let me live to write another one.'

Novelists embody plural selves all the time. What are characters, after all, if not other selves?

I'm telling you there are many ways to live and many ways to love. I guess my way is more roundabout than most.

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

Every reader writes the book he or she reads, supplying what isn't there, and that creative invention becomes the book.