Quotes from Siri Hustvedt

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. The raw affective material of memories is restructured and then told as stories from a remove.

but the story's interest lies in my struggle over semantics and the moral resonance of interpreting the meaning of a word.

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

Art is a reaching toward, a bid to be seen and understood and recognized by another. It involves a form of transference.

I imagined Stephen's companion was a beautiful woman. Her form and coloring changed with my moving thoughts, but the idea that she existed remained to nag at me, and even though she was only a spook of my jealousy, I couldn't stop the surge of fantasies about her and Stephen. By the time I left the library, I had invented several elaborate plots involving the two of them.

On the playground, children used to sing the chorus "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me." Few things then or now have ever struck me as more false than that ludicrous chant. Words can devastate, and they can heal.

My memory of the school building itself, its rooms and lockers, blackboards, and hallways, bring on a heavy, oppressive feeling. Whether I was more unhappy in school than any of my friends I don't know. I never would have said I didn't like school, and there are moments I distinctly remember enjoying, but these truths don't alter my memory of that place.

We are all, to one degree or another, made of what we call "memory", not only the bits and pieces of time visible to us in pictures that have hardened with our repeated stories, but also the memories we embody and don't understand.

We need to think of the self as a continuum, a steady story over time. The mind is always searching for similarities, associations, repetitions, because they create meaning.

Jackson Pollock.

Whether people are besieged by a chemical imbalance or thrown into a panic or depression by a wrenching loss, their inconsistencies also belong to the self.

I listened to the whine in my voice with a detached fascination. It was a false question. No answer would have pacified me. I had simply given in to a perverse need to ask, to expose and torment myself, and as soon as I heard the words, I experienced both relief and humiliation.

It's a sorry little fact that we are often as mysterious to ourselves as we are to others.

I told myself to remember the snow and to remember my pure, strong happiness at simply being alive to see it. That thought has never left me.

Standing there, I am struck by a strong but pleasant sadness. All my anxiety leaves me as I look outside. I stand and look for a while longer and then return to bed.

It is true that I suffered in a difficult and stupid love affair and that I worked at one bad job after another to try to keep myself going. Nevertheless, I remember that time as extraordinary, and I wouldn't trade it for anything. I don't even wish now that I had more money. And had I been asked if I was suffering at the time, I would have said a defiant no.

We cannot wish our worlds into being. Much depends on chance, on what we can't control, on others.

Through them, I was able to make a turn in myself, and somehow that view from the window seen alone and at night has become an image for what I now recognize as the end of my childhood.

Walking across campus made me feel sad, and I thought to myself, I wasn't happy there. Then, after reading, we walked past Butler Library. It was dark, but the light inside illuminated the windows. Students were reading and working, and those lit windows gave me a wonderful, weightless feeling. I understood for the first time how happy I had been there - in the library.

Ideas become part of our perceptions, but we are not always conscious of them. The story of art is continually being revised by art movements, by money and collectors, by "definitive" museum shows, by new concerns, discoveries, and ideologies that alter the telling of the past. Every story yokes together disparate elements in time, and every story, by its very nature, leaps over a lot.

suppose we are all the products of our parents' joy and suffering. Their emotions are written into us, as much as the inscriptions made by their genes.

In that way, I am like my mother. But I fell in love with your mother because she is exactly the opposite. She is deep and thorough and cares only about the questions she keeps trying to answer for herself. The world has little use for people like your mother, but her time will come.

Again, I don't fully understand my emotion response to the library or trust it. It was the site of a series of intellectual revelations that were crucial to me, not just as a student but as a human being.

It can only be that places left behind often become emotionally simplified - that they sound a single note of pain or pleasure, which means that they are never what they were.