Quotes from Siri Hustvedt

The genius of women has always been easy to discount, suppress, or attribute to the nearest man. When

We project our feelings onto other people, but there is always a dynamic that creates those inventions. The fantasies are made between people, and the ideas about those people live inside us ... And, even after they die, they are still there. I am made of the dead.

True 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.

I suppose we are all products of our parents' joy and suffering. Their emotions are written into us, as much as the inscriptions made by their genes.

I had left small-town, rural life for good, and I had no intention of ever returning, not because I didn't like my home but because I had always known that I would leave. Leaving was part of my life romance, part of an idea I had about myself as a person destined for adventure; and as far as I could tell, adventure lay in the urban wilds of Manhattan, not in the farmland of Minnesota.

Libraries are sexual dream factories. The langour brings it on.

Forgetting," I said, "is probably as much a part of life as remembering. We're all amnesiacs.

Worries about the power of a doctor's suggestions to influence and shape his patient's mind, whether they are made under hypnosis or not, are still with us.

It seems to me that going backward sometimes means going forward.

the spectator is the true vanishing point

I have begun to wonder what actually happens in our brains when we return to half-remembered places. What is memory's perspective? Does the man revise the boy's view or is the imprint relatively static, a vestige of what was once intimately known?

under our love making I felt a bleakness that couldnt be dispelled. The sadness was in both of us, and I think we pitied ourselves that night, as if we were other people looking down on the couple who lay together on the bed

Una mujer sentada junto a la ventana. Piensa / y mientras piensa, desespera / desespera por ser quien es / y no otra persona.

Not telling is just as interesting as telling I have found. Why speech, that short verbal journey from inside to outside can be excrutiating under certain circumstances is fascinating.

Old places fire the internal weather of our pasts. The mild winds, aching calms, and hard storms of forgotten emotions return to us when we return to the spots where they happened.

a sense that even if every scrap of a life were saved, thrown into a giant mound and then carefully sifted to extract all possible meaning, it would not add up to a life.

He was one of those people in New York who was purported to "know everybody". "Knowing everybody" is a phrase that denotes not having many relations with people but having relations with a few people generally thought to be significant and powerful.

I don't know why you are better and more beautiful than anybody else.

I often felt the girls' speech was interchangeable, without any individuality whatsoever, a kind of herd-speak they had all agreed upon.

It has taken me a very long time, a very long time to give myself permission to fly and breathe fire.

Do you remember when you told me I had beautiful knees? I never like my knees. In fact, I thought they were ugly. But your eyes have rehabilitated them. Whether I see you again or not, I'm going to live out my life with these two beautiful knees.

The best works of art are never innocuous: they alter the viewer's perceptual predictions. It is only when the patterns of our vision are disrupted that we truly pay attention and must ask ourselves what we are looking at.

We chart delusions through collective agreement.

My father once asked me if I knew where yonder was. I said I thought yonder was another word for there. He smiled and said, "No, yonder is between here and there.