Quotes from Siri Hustvedt

He hunched his shoulders and looked at the floor. With that movement, he entered the past. When he put on his jacket, kissed me again, and walked to the door, he was already a memory.

And the pen, as it were, Dear Reader, is now in my hand, and I am claiming the advantage, taking it for myself, for you will notice that the written word hides the body of the one who writes. For all you know, I might be a MAN in disguise. Unlikely, you say, with all this feminist prattle flying out here and there and everywhere, but can you be sure?

Los patriarcas nos defraudan. No ven y no escuchan. Suelen permanecer ciegos y hacer oídos sordos a las mujeres, se pavonean, alardean y actúan como si no estuviéramos allí. Y no siempre son hombres. A veces son mujeres, también ciegas que se odian a sí mismas. Están atrapadas en los hábitos perceptivos de los siglos, en las expectativas que han llegado a gobernar su mente.

I am fascinated that no one I have read seems to have noticed that the literature on Picasso continually turns grown-up women into girls.

It is not that there is no difference between men and women; it is how much difference that difference makes, and how we choose to frame it.

The history of art is full of women lying around naked for erotic consumption by men.

Desire is the engine of life, the yearning that goads us forward with stops along the way, but it has no destination, no final stop, except death.

My purely practical advice: Don't get excited. Don't raise your voice. Bite back. Bite back hard, but never cry.

The Singularity is at once an escape and a birth fantasy. I said to him: A Zeus dream that avoids the organic body altogether. Brand-new creatures burst forth from men's heads. Presto! The mother and her evil vagina disappears.

the distance needed for humor is always missing from dreams.

Es imposible adivinar el final de una historia mientras la estás viviendo; carece de contornos y se constituye como una serie de palabras y datos incipientes y, para ser sinceros, nunca recuperamos toda la información de aquello que fue.

All I can say is that every time I'm with him, she's there. She walks through every game I play with him. She whispers behind me every time I talk to him. When we draw, she's there. When we build blocks, she's there. When I scold him, she's there. Whenever I look up, she's there.

First loves are often terrible, probably because they are first and there is no conscious history into which they may be absorbed.

We are all wishful creatures, and we wish backward, too, not only forward, and thereby rebuild the curious, crumbling architecture of memory into structures that are more habitable.

We waste those eggs like crazy, of course, flushing them out every month in days of bleeding, but then most sperm are wholly useless as well, a thought to be considered elsewhere at greater length.

Medicine had granted permission to a fantasy that men have never abandoned, a muddled version of what Pygmalion wanted - something between a real woman and a beautiful thing.

Only the unprotected self can feel joy.

The articulation of the other's body in words turns it into a map of possible pleasure, effectively distancing that body by transforming it into an erotic object.

Feminism was good for me, as were any number of causes, but as I developed as a thinking person, the truisms and dogmas of every ideology became as worn as that book's cover.

Je n'écris plus, je suis écrite. (p.86)

D. W. Winnicott, un psychanaliste et pédiatre anglais: "Se réfugier dans la normalité, ce n'est pas la santé." (p.96)

Le cou n'est-il pas l'endroit où finit la tête et où le corps commence? (p.148)

People imagine that hope has degrees, but I think not. There is hope and there is no hope.

Drowning, she clung fiercely to that small, splintered piece of mast bobbing in the ocean we call justice. There is no justice, of course, or very little of it, and counting on it as a life raft is a big mistake.