Quotes from Siri Hustvedt

the idea of "extension" makes sense to me because art and the world can't be as easily divided as we sometimes imagine. One comes from the other, and they intermingle in the consciousness we as readers meet on the page. Art can and does make life, as James says, because when we encounter a great work of art if creates feeling, and that feeling in the reader, the viewer, or the listener is finally what the work means.

Years later, when I was grown (much taller than he ever grew) and I saw him in a local bar, he remembered my "crush" and said he regretted not acting on it. As silly as it sounds, this confession of his gave me real satisfaction, but the fact is he didn't want the fourteen-year-old I had been but the twenty-two-year-old I had become - another person altogether.

In good times I cry often, shedding tears easily, but when times are bad, my ducts go dry and I almost never weep.

Looking is part of love, but what you see when you look is anybody's guess.

The ache of love feels remarkably like the ache of grief or guilt. Emotional pain isn't distinguishable by feeling, only by language. We give a name to misery, not because we recognize the feeling but because we know its context.

I knew that by some definition both Teddy Giles and Mark Wechsler were insane, examples of indifference many regard as monstrous and unnatural; but in fact they weren't unique and their actions were recognizably human. Equating horror with the inhuman has always struck me as convenient but fallacious, if only because I was born into a century that should have ended such talk for good.

Art is not about art. Art is about life.   L. B.

The attraction remains because there is something about him that I can't reach, something strange and estranging. I like seeing him from a distance. I know that. I like to see him in a room full of people when he looks like a stranger, and then to remember that I do know him and that I will be going home with him.

Love affairs and marriages stand or fall on this secret. Familiarity and the pedestrian realities of everyday life are the enemies of eros.

He was an intense lover, and his zeal created in me a new sense of my own otherness. Sometimes after he was gone, I would examine myself naked in the mirror, and for an instant would imagine I saw what he saw - an enchanted body.

I don't want the words to be naked the way they are in faxes or in the computer. I want them to be covered by an envelope that you have to rip open in order to get at. I want there to be a waiting time -a pause between the writing and the reading. I want us to be careful about what we say to each other. I want the miles between us to be real and long. This will be our law -that we write our dailiness and our suffering very, very carefully.

Every sickness has an alien quality, a feeling of invasion and loss of control that is evident in the language we use about it.

There is no future without a past, because what is to be cannot be imagined except as a form of repetition.

Pain is always emotional. Fear and depression keep constant company with chronic hurting.

I will turn human anatomy into roses and stars and sea. I will dissect the beloveds body in metaphor.

A book is a collaboration between the one who reads and what is read and, at its best, that coming together is a love story like any other.

Reading is a private pursuit; one that takes place behind closed doors.

Intellectual curiosity about one's own illness is certainly born of a desire for mastery. If I couldn't cure myself, perhaps I could at least begin to understand myself.

Although sometimes the morbid is also the transcendent, the transcendent cannot be reduced to the morbid.

That night as I lay in bed, I thought of several things I could have said and mourned the fact that my wit usually bloomed late, peaking when it no longer mattered, during the solitary hours close to midnight.

Dreams are stories made by and for the dreamer, and each dreamer has his own folds to open and knots to untie.

The truth is that personality inevitably bleeds into all forms of our intellectual life. We all extrapolate from our own lives in order to understand the world.

I've always thought of wholeness and integration as necessary myths. We're fragmented beings who cement ourselves together, but there are always cracks. Living with the cracks is part of being, well, reasonably healthy

Time is not outside us, but inside. Only we live with past, present, and future, and the present is too brief to experience anyway; it is retained afterward and then it is either codified or it slips into amnesia.