Siri Hustvedt Quotes

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.

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

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

We chart delusions through collective agreement.

We are all dying one by one. We all smell of mortality, and we can't wash it off.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

...the distance needed for humor is always missing from dreams.

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.

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

Only the unprotected self can feel joy.