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Siri Hustvedt Quotes | Quotes said by Siri Hustvedt

  • Siri Hustvedt Quote #1

    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 Quote #2

    Accumulated experience always alters perception of the past.

  • Siri Hustvedt Quote #3

    Because I knew so much about him, because I had been close to him, I couldn't bring the various fragments of my experience with him into a single coherent image. The truth was mobile and contradictory, and I was willing to live with that.

  • Siri Hustvedt Quote #4

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

  • Siri Hustvedt Quote #5

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

  • Siri Hustvedt Quote #6

    Crippled and crazy, we hobble toward the finish line, pen in hand.

  • Siri Hustvedt Quote #7

    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 Quote #8

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

  • Siri Hustvedt Quote #9

    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 Quote #10

    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 Quote #11

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

  • Siri Hustvedt Quote #12

    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 Quote #13

    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 Quote #14

    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 Quote #15

    I said very little. I knew that for the time being I was the open air, the place to put the words, not a real interlocutor. And then, ekthout a transition of any kind, she began to tell me .... {p. 134}

  • Siri Hustvedt Quote #16

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

  • Siri Hustvedt Quote #17

    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 Quote #18

    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 Quote #19

    In August of 2002, I survived a car accident. Although I can still see the van speeding toward us, I cannot bring to mind the crash itself - only its aftermath.

  • Siri Hustvedt Quote #20

    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 Quote #21

    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 Quote #22

    It's hard to penetrate characters who are very cut off and lack empathy and to do it with sympathy. It's so easy to make a damaged character repugnant.

  • Siri Hustvedt Quote #23

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

  • Siri Hustvedt Quote #24

    Memory changes as a person matures.

  • Siri Hustvedt Quote #25

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

  • Siri Hustvedt Quote #26

    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 Quote #27

    Most of us accept that although we may believe our dreams to be real events, upon waking, we can tell the difference between nocturnal hallucinations and reality.

  • Siri Hustvedt Quote #28

    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 Quote #29

    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 Quote #30

    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.

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