Quotes from Siri Hustvedt

When I spoke to her, I had the feeling that her thoughts had been nourished in wide-open spaces where talk was sparse and silence ruled.

The recollections of an older man are different from those of a younger man. What seemed vital at forty may lose its significance at seventy. We manufacture stories, after all, from the fleeting sensory material that bombards us at every instant, a fragmented series of pictures, conversations, odors, and the touch of things and people. We delete most of it to live with some semblance of order, and the reshuffling of memory goes on until we die.

I remember thinking how easy it is to speak in clichés, to steal a line from pulp fiction and let it fall. We can only hover around the inexpressible with our words anyway, and there is comfort in saying what we have heard before.

That is the strangeness of language: it crosses the boundaries of the body, is at once inside and outside, and it sometimes happens that we don't notice the threshold has been crossed.

We read each other through our eyes, and anatomically they are an extension of our brains. When we catch someone's eye, we look into a mind.

Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.

Memory changes as a person matures.

There are tragedies and there are comedies, aren't there? And they are often more the same than different, rather like men and women, if you ask me. A comedy depends on stopping the story at exactly the right moment.

I've always thought that love thrives on a certain kind of distance, that it requires an awed separateness to continue. Without that necessary remove, the physical minutiae of the other person grows ugly in its magnification.

Reading is perception as translation. The inert signs of an alphabet become living meanings in the mind.

Escribir es un modo de localizar mi hambre, y el hambre no es sino un vacío.

We are all dying one by one. We all smell of mortality, and we can't wash it off.

The faculty of memory cannot be separated from the imagination. They go hand in hand. To one degree or another, we all invent our personal pasts. And for most of us those pasts are built from emotionally colored memories.

We must all allow ourselves the fantasy of projection from time to time, a chance to clothe ourselves in the imaginary gowns and tails of what has never been and never will be. This gives some polish to our tarnished lives, and sometimes we may choose one dream over another, and in the choosing find some respite from ordinary sadness. After all, we, none of us, can ever untangle the knot of fictions that make up that wobbly thing we call a self.

Ture stories can't be told forward, only backward. We invent them from the vantage point of an ever-changing present and tell ourselves how they unfolded.

Great books are the ones that are urgent, life-changing, the ones that crack open the reader's skull and heart.

The third-person or 'objective,' static, reductive models used in most science are important and yield significant results, but they have their limitations.

I am convinced that during bouts of insomnia, I have sometimes slept without knowing it.

I am always suspicious of those who impose 'rules' on child rearing. Every child is different in terms of temperament and learning, and every parent responds to a particular child, not some generalized infant or youngster.

We sometimes imagine we want what we don't really want.

I have found that all of my memories seem to need a place and that a good part of what we think of as explicit memory has to do with location.

Every mental state is also physical.

American mass media culture, with its celebrities, shopping hysteria, sound bites, formulaic plots, received ideas, and nauseating repetitions, depresses me.

I am an American, but a sense of otherness was part of my growing up. I spoke Norwegian before I spoke English. My mother is Norwegian.