Quotes from Siri Hustvedt

My arguments usually convinced Erica until she felt it again: the tiny sting of possible rejection - always ambiguous, always subject to many interpretations.

It marks the moment when a meandering conversation between two men took an irrevocable turn toward friendship.

He interrupted me more frequently and summarized my complaints in an increasingly optimistic light. I couldn't see or feel these changes myself, but Dr. Fish was confident, and I half believed him. The truth is that I participated in the deception. I was studying for my oral exams then, and I was desperate for the treatments to work.

Sometimes, I would put down my book and look at the two of them in the light of my reading lamp. I now think I was lucky that I wasn't young. I knew what I might not have known earlier - that my happiness had come. I even told myself to fix the image of my wife and son in my mind while I watched them sleep, and it is still there, a clear picture left by my conscious wish.

Like most people confined to an institution, she had been divested of a past life.

She sat in silence on a chair looking over him, content with the fullness of her own thoughts.

Perhaps I wished for something rather than nothing--a smack of passion to make me believe I was really there for him, not missing. And then the blow rises up from imaginary depths. When there is nothing, the phantoms come up to fill the emptiness. It is not true that nothing comes of nothing. There is always something.

His distaste was palpable. Although he cultivated ideas that embraced the perverse and forbidden, Stephen was squeamish, and his adventures were strictly of the fashionable, literary sort.

Supuse que aquella entereza la llevaba en la sangre, como un rasgo escandinavo heredado de una larga estirpe de personas que sabían sufrir solas.

Sje?aš se kad si mi rekao da imam lijepa koljena? Nikad mi se nisu svi?ala moja koljena. Zapravo, mislila sam da su ružna. Ali, tvoje su ih o?i rehabilitirale. Bez obzira na to ho?u li te ikad više vidjeti, proživjet ?u svoj život s dva lijepa koljena.

Unato? tim trenuta?nim uvidima u ne?iji život, platna i materijali na njima imali su neku apstraktnu odliku, krajnju prazninu koja je izražavala bizarnost same smrtnosti, osje?aj da, ?ak i ako sa?uvamo svaku mrvicu života, nagomilamo ih na divovsku hrpu, a potom pažljivo prosijemo da izvu?emo sva mogu?a zna?enja, sve to zajedno opet ne?e sastaviti jedan život.

I love clothes and have often pined for them - the beautiful dress or coat in the window. My desire is for the transformation I imagine will take place, a kind of enchantment of my own body.

In this early memory he looks different from the way I would remember him later.

It's almost too perfect - the poster girl for an illness in the early days of photography sees the world in black and white.

Of course, such a moment isn't easy to analyze because every social encounter is laden with the unsaid and the unseen.

I'm sure that my dreams of maleness are least partly about escaping the cultural expectation that burden femininity, but I also think they are something more complex, that the dreams recognize a truth that there is a man in me as well as a woman and that this duality is in fact part of being human, but not one that is always easy to reconcile.

Through experience most adults lose that intense feeling of the unfamiliar - of being not home.

Despite my efforts, I was something less than a model student, subject to passionate eruptions in class and wild excursions into related topics. At home I rehearsed calm deliveries, practiced lowering my voice to make it sound authoritative and cool, but in the heat of the moment, I would always forget.

I watched the gulls and looked over at Lady Liberty. I thought about what Harry must be feeling because she wouldn't see her again, not like this, anyway. I wanted her to know it would be better, more beautiful on the other side, but it was sad because we can't help loving what's around us even if it is grasping and attachment to the things that don't really matter when you take a higher spiritual perspective.

The truth is that the idea of home and the idea of our mother and father were inseparable.

Alone, I was strident and articulate in a way I could never be when I faced him. His presence made me shrink, and though it irritated me, I also looked forward to that sensation of being dwarfed, couldn't wait to sit beside him in his office again.

A child's true independence is the product of a strong, reassuring parental presence, and it is that presence that we take with us when we walk out the door for good.

I suppose Stanley fell in love with me during those talks about life and books, but he probably loved someone else, a person who wasn't me.

Because I knew so much about him, because I had been close to him, I couldn't bring the various fragments of my experience with him into a single coherent image. The truth was mobile and contradictory, and I was willing to live with that.