Quotes from Siri Hustvedt

His experience of the world and his empathy for other people produced a body of work that adamantly refused ready categories, received ideas, and preordained notions of all kinds in favor of the difficult, strange, tender, and always multifarious arena of human relations and emotions. I think James felt that every attempt to reduce life to a system of beliefs - religious, political, or philosophical - must inevitably become a form of lying.

In his response, James argued: "... all direct 'encouragement' - the thing you enjoin me on - encouragement of the short cut and say 'artless' order, is really more likely than not to be shallow and misleading...

Lucille had once called them psychic's hands, and I wondered what it would be like to penetrate the minds of others. I knew little enough about myself.

Beneath her lowered eyes were faint purple shadows. I knew what I was seeing: dry grief, grief grown old and familiar. It enters your bones and lives there, because it has no use for flesh, and after a while you feel that you're all bone, hard and dessicated, like a skeleton in a classroom.

The uniformly pretty waitresses discussed the finer points of cocaine, Quaaludes, and other intoxicants, arguing for this one or that, with the energy of young philosophers. My fellow workers read my silence on the subject as moral condemnation, but in truth, I've always been afraid of drugs. The jolts and tingles that might be gained from these substances don't attract me. My interest has always been in maintaining balance, not tipping it.

Of course women are sexual objects; so are men. Even while I was hugging that book of feminist rhetoric to my chest, I groomed myself carefully, zipped myself into tight jeans, and went after the boy I wanted most, mentally picking apart desirable male bodies like a connoisseur.

She's still in love with you," Violet said. "I know." "Or maybe she's in love with the idea of me on the other side of the country.

Erotic pleasure, derived from the most intimate physical contact, thrives on the paradox that only by keeping alive the strangeness of that other person can eroticism last.

Sexual feeling is distinct from affection, even though they often conspire, but this fact runs against the grain of classic feminist arguments.

American feminism has always had a puritanical strain, an imposed blindness to erotic truth.

all of us need a story outside ourselves, a form through which we imagine ourselves as players in the game.

we can't escape the erotic vocabulary of our culture any more than we can escape language itself.

we imagine ourselves as the other person will see us, mirroring our own desire in them, and most of what we do is borrowed from a vocabulary of familiar images.

The fear came from the fact that what he did was unpredictable. He did not play by the rules, and once those rules had been broken, I imagined that anything was possible

My life had shrunk, and when I thought of past events, when I talked to my parents on the phone, when I saw an acquaintance or fellow student on the street, all these things seemed to be from another lifetime.

But the child inevitably haunts the adult, even when the former self is no longer recognizable.

Legends can live and breathe only on verbal terrain

Neither of these staring experiences was erotic for me, but they may have been for the two young men who did the staring. Who I was for either of them remains a mystery to me, a blank filled with my own dread.

The past is fragile, as fragile as bones grown brittle with age, as fragile as ghosts seen in windows or the dreams that fall apart upon waking and leave nothing behind them but a feeling of unease or distress or, more rarely, a kind of eerie satisfaction.

Spite has focus, a keenness that sympathy lacks.

And later in the letter, he elaborated further, "It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, for our consideration and application of these things, and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.

James believed in the power of art, not because he thought it would change the world or because he imagined it could be a mirror of life. Art, he explains to Wells, is "for the extension of life, which is the novel's best gift.

She fascinated me almost as much as he did, because, after all, she was his beloved, and I studied her carefully for clues to her success.

A young person always extrapolates human reality from her own life.