Quotes from Siri Hustvedt

If not violently overthrown, expectation can have a power in itself, can invest a place with what literally isn't there.

Despite the fact that he fathered ten children, Dickens, the write, never gave up his position as a child. He identified with children and with the child-like - those who are not in power and who suffer under the fickle and often sadistic demands of those who are.

It's a language I've come to hate, because it admits no mystery and no ambiguity into its smug vocabulary, which arrogantly suggests that everything can be known.

In the past I had given myself up to ephemeral pleasures, falling into bed with near strangers, and had no regrets. But those encounters had been simple. With George, I was lost - like a person in another country who can't read the signs. And George had taken the advantage. By claiming that I, unlike he, was intelligible - an open book - he had made me vulnerable.

No doubt I would have felt reverent in less lovely places, because I imagined a past I connected to myself.

Fathers are essentially different from mothers because we were all once in our mother's bodies, are born out of those bodies, and as infants take food from them. Paternity is more distant and less direct than maternity; it's a claim we accept as children, one inscribed in our legitimate, that is, legal, names.

Writing novels means being plural, being divided among your creatures and suffering with them.

Equating horror with the inhuman has always struck me as convenient but fallacious, if only because I was born into a century that should have ended such talk for good.

A powerfully imagined event can evoke the same emotions as a real event. Few artists would contradict this, and yet there no doubt people who would find it odd that a fiction, when fully imagined, can create something parallel to the disruptions in madness, but what Freud called "sublimation" is the transformation of inner dramas, fears, and wounds into something else: a work of art outside the body of the artist.

Everybody knows what a dry text is - one that has left out feeling, one that bores you stiff because if doesn't speak to anything human, hides the obvious under obfuscation, or is simply incomprehensible.

I read the stories I've been told in my own way and make a narrative of them. Narrative is a chain of links, and I link furiously, merrily hurdling over holes, gaps, and secrets. Nevertheless, I try to remind myself that the holes are there. They are always there, not only in the lives of others but in my own life as well.

The rhythm that allows no change, no difference, is one that seeks to stop time, and stopping time means death. The teacher has lost the possibility of an ongoing story because he is trapped in the trauma of a single moment and is never released.

The outside also becomes us. A human being is born an unfinished organism and as the person develops experience with others becomes a physical reality. The I and the you are not as neatly separated as the culture likes to believe.

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

Mirroring makes speech possible; language relies on the reflective quality of I and you through which verbal interaction becomes possible.

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.

Normal life includes making sense of fragmentary memories.

Like everyone, Bill rewrote his life. The recollections of an older man are different from those of a young man. What seemed vital at forty might lose its significance at seventy. We manufacture stories, after all, from the fleeting sensory material that bombards us at every instant, a fragmented series of pictures, conversations, odors, and the touch of things and people. We delete most of it to live with some semblance of order, and the reshuffling of memory goes on until we die.

Memories that have never been told aren't yet solid stories; they are potential stories. It may be that the interlocutor is the self, as in John Harmon's monologue, but it is always the self in relation to the idea of another, the "I" addressing a "you," because the desire to tell implies that the tale must become comprehensible to a listener.

Augustine's insight that emotion dims in memory, however, is overwhelmingly true of our episodic memories. The cooling of the emotions that belong to such recollections is built into the nature of this kind of memory, because it is quickly turned into narrative.

We can't remember our infancies, but they live in our bodies, and had I not been frail at birth, I would have been someone else, and I would have had other thoughts.

Accumulated experience always alters perception of the past.

The officers of the law in Verbum, a town of six thousand residents, spent untold hours investigating the disappearances of lawn dwarfs.

I found that air of menace more inspiring than upsetting