Quotes from Siri Hustvedt

That's the problem with seeing things. Nothing is clear. Feelings, ideas shape what's in front of you. Cézanne wanted the naked world, but the world is never naked. In my work, I want to create doubt." He stopped and smiled at me. "Because that's what we are sure of.

Art can speak to what falls outside theory, and it can also embody felt ideas.

I move through it like a phantom, and 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?

His was an illness that besets the intellectual: the indefatigable will to mastery. Chronic and incurable, it afflicts those who lust after a world that makes sense.

Vivimos en un mundo de mezclas. El mundo transita a través de nosotros por medio de la comida, los libros, las imágenes, el resto de las personas...

Hon tog till sig en liten del av det som fanns där, bäcken bakom vårt hus, skogarna med sina stenar och sin mossa och buskvegetation, och blodroten, blåklockorna och violerna som spirade i den våta jorden varje vår. Allt detta blev henne förtroget, men fälten med sina ändlösa rader som strålade samman vid horisonten under en oändlig himmel rymde ingen riktig mening för henne. Hur älskar man så mycket tomhet? (189)

Om jag inte kände det jag känner när jag ser dig skulle du vara någon annan. Det vore hemskt. Om jag inte mindes att jag älskar dig, menar jag. (190)

But mixing is the way of the world. The world passes through us - food, books, pictures, other people.

When you're young, I think it's harder to know what you want, how much of others you're willing to take in. When I was living in Paris, I tried on ideas about myself like dresses. I was always reinventing who I was.

I've decided that mixing is a key term. It's better than suggestion, which is one-sided. It explains what people rarely talk about, because we define ourselves as isolated, closed bodies who bump up against each other but stay shut. Descartes was wrong. It isn't: I think, there I am. It's: I am because you are. That's Hegel - well, the short version.

I'm fond of that little scene. Whether my memory is completely accurate or not, it has a sharpness that nothing I look at now can possibly have.

Minusta tuntuu hyvältä nähdä luuni. Pidän siitä että näen ja tunnen ne. Kun minun ja luitteni välillä on liikaa lihaa, tuntuu kuin jotenkin etääntyisin itsestäni. Ymmärrätkö?

Most people aren't attacked by colors.

that 'now' you're talking about hardly exists. We feel it, but it's impossible to measure. The past is always eating up the present." I stroked his hair and paused. "I think I've always loved paintings for that reason. Somebody makes a canvas in time, but after it's made, a painting stays in the present.

You're saying that anything's art if people say it is? Even me?" "Exactly. It's perspective - not content.

She meant that if your conscience holds you back, if it muddles the purity of your desire, if it gives you mixed feelings, don't do it.

I didn't know exactly what to say. "Rush" is a word that pretty much covered every initial sexual encounter I had ever had in my life. and the fact that these two young people felt it necessary to deliberate over sex made me feel a little sad. I have known women who withdrew from me at the last moment and women who regretted their passion the next morning, but a precoital committee meeting had never been a part of my experience.

We had been pulled apart by absence, but that same absence had shackled us together for life.

Who had read my poems, who held my hand, who was dead before he could visit me in the hospital where he had been, too, landed, too, on his flights to heaven and drops into hell.

The place where I am is missing from my view. It's like that for everybody. We don't see ourselves in the picture, do we? It's a kind of hole.

How she loved you, her bubeleh, her boychik, her darling, but there was something cloying in that love, something theatrical and selfish, and you knew it and, as soon as you were big enough, you kept her at a safe distance.

The misery I felt was grief. I wanted her back, my old self.

The Five lived in a ferocious present because unlike the young, who entertain their finality in a remote, philosophical way, these women knew that death was not abstract.

Each person does see the world in a different way. There is not a single, unifying, objective truth. We're all limited by our perspective.