Siri Hustvedt Quotes
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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.
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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.
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Pain is always emotional. Fear and depression keep constant company with chronic hurting.
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I will turn human anatomy into roses and stars and sea. I will dissect the beloveds body in metaphor.
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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.
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We sometimes imagine we want what we don't really want.
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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]
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There is this assumption that much of what I write is about my life, and that simply is not true.
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We lose ourselves in stories; that's the beauty of literary art.
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It is fascinating to me that when the lists of the great writers are trotted out year after year, you often find lists without a single woman mentioned.
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There's a phenomenology of being sick, one that depends on temperament, personal history, and the culture which we live in.
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I think because mothers usually are the people who take care of us when we're little, and when we're little those mothers are omnipotent, perhaps men even more than women don't like to think about that dependency. That dependency is horror.
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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.
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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.
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The fictive is an emormous territory it turns out, its boundaries vague, and there is little certainty about where it begins and ends.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Every sickness has an alien quality, a feeling of invasion and loss of control that is evident in the language we use about it.
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Every painting is always two paintings: The one you see, and the one you remember.
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Memory is essential to who we are, and memories can be both implicit and explicit - unconscious and conscious.
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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
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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.
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Many writers over the centuries simply do not have the reputations they deserve because they were female, and that is an act of suppression.
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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.
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Demonstration of mastery gives a feeling of power and that feeling of power is a good feeling.
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We chart delusions through collective agreement.
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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.
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There is no future without a past, because what is to be cannot be imagined except as a form of repetition.
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