Quotes from Siri Hustvedt

Everyone has an inner life that is as large and complex and rich as my own.

This overt touch of vanity made me pity him for a moment.

Seeing isn't always believing. Traumatic events are often accompanied by a form of disassociation.

He talks like me when I'm pretending." Matt deepened his voice, "Like this - I'm Spiderman." I stared down at Matthew. "Well, you're right, Matt," I said. "He is pretending." "But who is he pretending to be?" Matt asked. "Himself," I said.

But I missed Ruth terribly, and I understood once she was gone how much her presence colored mine. Ruth was the heroine of her own life story, and when we were together, she made me the heroine of mine. She gave daily hardships the stature of romance and drama.

the ironic point of view is sometimes the only legitimate way to interpret the reality we live in.

She talked as if she were observing her own sentences...

and she, in turn, had cast a spell over the art world through the magic of controversy.

but the fact is that New York is as much a myth as a place, and because we all participate in that fiction, we make it partly real.

The smarter you are, the sexier you are.

Real New York and imaginary New York aren't easily separated. The stuff of a city isn't only material; it's spiritual as well.

How many other are there? I thought. People, things, seen and then forgotten, leaving nothing behind them, not even the knowledge that they're missing.

Awkward brilliance in a boy is more easily categorized, and it conveys no sexual threat.

and although the young writer never met his literary mentor, the spiritual connection between the two writers would never be dissolved.

Infatuated people often look ridiculous to others; their nonstop cooing, touching, and kissing can be intolerable to friends who have left that stage behind them.

James explores the psychological implications of belief - how a climate of ideas can invade, affect, mingle with, and be used, both consciously and unconsciously, by a person in the throes of passion.

My hope made me pathetic, but I comforted myself with the fact that I was my only witness.

Erica's imminent departure changed us. The knowledge that we would soon be separated made us both more indulgent, relieving us of a burden I still can't name. I didn't want her to go away, and yet the fact that she was going away loosened a bolt in the machinery of our marriage. It had become a machine by then, a churning repetitious engine of mourning.

the impersonal and the personal are always connected.

Language, after all, is impersonal and personal, particular and general, both inside us and outside us, and James writes with a profound awareness of this fact. Words are where the public and private intersect.

Although relatively more open to same-sex unions, contemporary American culture nevertheless bristles with a need to categorize human eroticism, a force that by its very nature resists definition and plays a role in most relations between people of either and both sexes, whether it is acted upon or not.

El pasado es frágil, tan frágil como quebradizos los huesos con los años, tan frágil como los fantasmas que vemos en las ventanas o los sueños que se descomponen al despertar y no dejan atrás nada aparte de una sensación de inquietud o angustia, o, menos a menudo, una extraña satisfacción.

It wasn't until I was living with Violet that I saw how bizarre my life had been with Lucille. Violet's so present, so vital. She grabs me all the time and tells me she loves me. Lucille never said that." Bill stopped talking. "Not once." He looked up from the screwdriver. "For years, day in and day out, I lived with a fictional character, a person I'd invented.

In the arts," James wrote, "feeling is always meaning.