Quotes from Siri Hustvedt

Loss. A known absence. If you didn't know it, it would be nothing, which it is, of course, a nothing of another kind, as acutely felt as a blister, but a tumult, too, in the region of the heart and lungs, an emptiness with a name: You

No one rejoices more in revenge than women, wrote Juvenal. Women do most delight in revenge, wrote Sir Thomas Browne. Sweet is revenge, especially to women, wrote Lord Byron. And I say, I wonder why, boys. I wonder why.

Sometimes even now I think I see him in the street or standing in a window or bent over a book in a coffee shop. And in that instant, before I understand that it's someone else, my lungs tighten and I lose my breath.

Artists are cannibals. We consume other artists, and they become part of us—flesh and bone—only to be spewed out again in our own works.

It was babies I loved looking at, the little Lords, sensuous delights of pudgy flesh and fluids. For at least three years I was awash in milk and poop and piss and spit-up and sweat and tears. It was paradise. It was exhausting. It was boring. It was sweet, exciting, and sometimes, curiously, very lonely.

Distortion is part of desire. We always change the things we want.

In effect, painting is the still memory of [the artist's] human motion, and our individual responses to it depend on who we are, on our character, which underlines the simple truth that no person leaves himself behind in order to look at a painting.

But we all live there, I thought to myself, in the imaginary stories we tell ourselves about our lives.

New York City is the place where people come to invent, reinvent, or find the room they need to be who they wish to be.

I'm not sure that love is an excuse for everything

I had read my way not to knowledge but into an inscrutable oblivion.

We all start out the same in our mothers' wombs. We, all of us, when floating in the amniotic sea of our earliest oblivion, have gonads. If the Y chromosome didn't swoop in to act on the gonads of some of us and make testes, we would all become women. In biology, the Genesis story is reversed: Adam becomes Adam out of Eve, not the other way around.

Very simply, for the mind, absence can be a catalyst for presence.

The fictive is an emormous territory it turns out, its boundaries vague, and there is little certainty about where it begins and ends.

Six months isn't such a long time. That's how long it's been since I came to see you in May, but the fact is it's been much longer than that. We've spent years living inside each other.

I was afraid of it, because I liked it. It excited me.

Aggressive questions are usually pedagogic - that is, the answer has already been written in the mind of the questioner, who then waits with a reply. It's pretend listening.

But spectacular lies don't need to be perfect. They rely less on the liar's skill than on the listener's expectations and wishes. After Mark's dishonesty was exposed, I understood how much I wised that what he had told me had been true.

It's odd the way life works, the way it mutates and wanders, the way one thing becomes another.

All thoughts of revenge are born of the pain of helplessness. 'I suffer' becomes 'You will suffer'. And let us not lie: Vengeance is invigorating. It focuses and enlivens us, and it quashes grief because it turns the emotion outward. In grief we go to pieces. In revenge we come together as a single pointed weapon aimed at a target. However destructive in the long run, it serves a useful purpose for a time

My mother's idiosyncratic definition of the word is the following: we all suffer and we all die."Never, ever," my mother said to me when I was eleven,"say 'pass away' for 'to die.' People die. They don't evaporate.

No existe el futuro sin el pasado, porque lo que va a suceder no se puede imaginar más como una forma de repetición.

Sometimes I feel that what we do and what we say is just a repetition, that's it's all happened before,' I said. 'Déjà vu,' he said, his voice flat. 'No, not that, not identical - vaguely the same, like we're trapped in a pattern or an idea that we can't give up, that leads us by the nose...

Infancy is irretrievable. Its memories live underground. To what extent they return by stealth or are triggered by various catalysts remains an ongoing question.