Quotes from Siri Hustvedt

A comedy depends on stopping the story at exactly the right moment.

I wonder now whether it isn't dangerous to assign significance to that which is essentially vacant, but we can't seem to avoid it. We cover up the holes with our speech, explaining away the emptiness until we forget it is there.

In college I retreated to the library. I have always loved libraries - the quiet, the smell, the expectation of imminent discovery. In the next book I will find it - some unspeakable pleasure or startling revelation or extraordinary nuance I had never felt or thought of before.

It may be that I link every library to that first one - to my early childhood experience of drawing on the floor near my father's desk. A library is of course a real place, but it is also an unreal one. What happens there is mostly silent. I think I've always liked the whispering aspect of libraries, the hushing librarians and my feeling of solitude among many.

If the vulnerable aren't also proud, they are crushed.

I had no destination, just the will to go, and I went fast.

My senses remained on high alert, and even thinking back on that time makes me feel giddy. I could never have a similar experience now. I have too much behind me, too many references, stories, too many years of thoughts.

This was not some regular dame. No, this was a doll with high tastes, with ideas dancing in her head like fireflies.

But the worst was that as time wore on, I became more and more afraid of myself, or perhaps more conscious of the fear I have always had - a fear that within me is some danger I can't name.

The very idea of a library for me is bound to my mother and father and includes the history of my own metamorphosis through books, fictions that are no less part of me than much of my own history.

I was at a dinner party in New York during which the host loudly declared his undying love for his wife. Two weeks later, he left her for another woman. I am as convinced that his declaration was sincere as I am that he was a cipher to himself.

Without a viewer, a reader, a listener, art is dead. Something happens between me and it, an "it" that carries in itself another person's willed act, a thing suffused with another person's subjectivity, and in it I may feel pain, humor, sexual desire, discomfort. And that is why I don't treat artworks as I would treat a chair, but I don't treat them as a real person either.

Martin Buber believed that the foundation for human existence is relational. People can create between-zones of resonant meaning. In a letter to Ludwig Binswanger, the Swiss psychiatrist, he wrote, "Dialog in my sense implies the necessity of the unforeseen, and its basic element is surprise, the surprising mutuality." Isn't this what happens when I hear the words spoken to me in the room as alive, not dead. Isn't it always a surprise?

the forgotten back-and-forth of early life becomes who we are.

In the arts feeling is always meaning.

short-lived passions I pursued on my own terms.

But don't you think that everybody is finally the same in the most essential ways? Some lives are probably much duller than others, but it's impossible to know how people live inside themselves, isn't it? I mean, a life could seem boring on the outside and be tumultuous within. Isn't cruelty more contemptible than ordinariness?

Seeing is flux," he said. I mentioned the hidden narratives in his work, and he said that for him stories were like blood running through a body - paths of life. It was a revealing metaphor, and I never forgot it.

I liked the streets as much as museums, and I spent hours in the city wandering around, inhaling the garbage.

There were many books inside me by then, and yet these jolted me with their originality. I met the man before I read what he had written, but if I had not loved his work as I did or if he had not admired my writing, it would have changed things. Our work has been an intimate part of our love affair and marriage for twenty-three years, but what I read wasn't then and isn't now what I know when I'm with him. His work comes from the place in him I can't know.

I'm telling you there are many ways to live and many ways to love. I guess my way is more roundabout than most.

I am afraid of writing, too, because when I write I am always moving toward the unarticulated, the dangerous, the place where the walls don't hold. I don't know what's there, but I'm pulled toward it.

The black-and-white figures of the photographs have had to stand in place of my memory and yet I have always felt that their unmarked graves became a part of me. What was unwritten then is inscribed into what I call myself.

I was walking home from the library on Broadway, and I remember that the street looked different to me, very clear and beautiful, and I felt incredibly happy. I even said to myself, 'I've never been happier than I am now.