Quotes from Siri Hustvedt

Insanity is a state of profound self-absorption.

What constitutes rigorous thinking? Is ambiguity dangerous or is it liberating? Why are the sciences regarded as hard and masculine and the arts and the humanities as soft and feminine? And why is hard usually perceived as so much better than soft?

The truth is that what fascinates me is not so much being in a place as not being there: how places live in the mind once you have left them, how they are imagined before you arrive, or how they are seemingly called out of nothing to illustrate a thought or story like my tree down yonder. These mental spaces map our Innes lives more fully than any "real" map, delineating the borders of here and there that also shape what we see in the present.

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

Quizás has guardado un secreto en el corazón que debido a todo su goce o dolor considerabas demasiado precioso para compartirlo con otra persona.

And in my secret heart of hearts, I admit there was some old mush that hadn't been scooped out of me by hardship and insanity. But there was also the story itself, the story Boris and I had written together, and in that story, our bodies and thoughts and memories had gotten themselves so tangled up that it was hard to see where one person's ended and the other's began.

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

We drank coffee. We talked. She loved Charles Dickens, whom she read in Norwegian. Years after she was dead, I wrote a dissertation on Dickens, and though my study of the great man would no doubt have alarmed her, I had a funny feeling that by taking on the English novelist I was returning to my Norwegian roots.

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

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

In these philosophies of "difference," boundaries blur, category is destabilized, and hybrids are created. Grosz

Through a story that delineates the power of words to obfuscate, exploit, and distort human reality, Henry James offers his own nuanced, precise, and sensitive prose in opposition to the dead phrases that stream from lecture halls, line the pages of newspapers, and float from one speaker to another in that arid climate that was Boston.

I mean that you've invented the story yourself. It belong to you, not me. You've already chosen an ending, a way out. I suppose it's inevitable that you want satisfaction.

That city has changed and the United States has changed since James wrote his American novel, but dead phrases, empty rhetoric, clichéd though, as well as readymade opinions and just plain nonsense proffered to the public by the press show no sign of abating anytime soon.

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

It encapsulates so neatly the lesson of expectation and reality that it could serve as a parable. The fact that tomatoes are good is beside the point. If you think you're getting an apple, a tomato will revolt you. That New York should be nicknamed the Big Apple, that an apple is the fruit of humankind's first error and the expulsion from paradise, that America and paradise have been linked and confused ever since Europeans first hit its shores, makes the story reverberate as myth.

En mayor o menor medida, todos inventamos nuestro pasado.

I know that what's said is often less important than the tone of voice in which the words are spoken. There is music in dialogue, mysterious harmonies and dissonances that vibrate in the body like a tuning fork.

There is always a gap between what we feel and what we say.

More than anything, the pictures had altered my vision of George. The graceful young man with long dark hair and beautiful manners had spawned a double, and it was this second man, the one I didn't know, who fascinated me.

Para quién narramos, después de todo? Incluso en la soledad de nuestra cabeza existe un supuesto otro, la segunda persona de nuestro discurso.

I have always found it amazing that in exchange for paper I can get a book or a dress, that the stock market actually rises and falls on rumor - mere talk - and that people trade in something called Futures, as if such a thing were possible.

You really believe that there are subjects that shouldn't be photographed?' George said. He spoke evenly and softly. 'Maybe I do,' I said, thinking aloud. 'You believe in censorship then,' said Stephen. I looked up at Stephen. His face was tight, combative. 'Not censorship,' I said slowly. 'That's external. I mean control from the inside. After all, pictures can lie, too, can convey falseness rather than truth.

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