Quotes from Siri Hustvedt

Gatsby's ghost may have haunted me, because even in high school I knew that promise lay in the East, particularly in New York City, and ever so vaguely, I began to dream of what I had never seen and where I had never been.

All wishes, however wrongheaded, however great or noble or ephemeral, must have an object, and that object is usually more ideal than real.

When I take this walk, the apartment is always empty. I move through it like a phantom, and I have begun to wonder what exactly 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?

What was unwritten then is inscribed into what I call myself.

He is a creature of will, and the beauty of his will overreaches the tawdriness of his real object: Daisy.

I have always felt that there is a triangular quality to every love affair. There are two lovers and a third element - the idea of being in love itself. I wonder if it is possible to fall in love without this third presence, an imaginary witness to love as a thing of wonder, cast in the glow of our deepest stories about ourselves.

The advice is a call to empathy, the ultimate act of the imagination, and the true ground of all fiction.

I see what I did not see. I experience that which is outside my own experience. This is the magic of reading novels. This is the working out of the problem of illusion. I take a book off the shelf. I open it up and begin to read, and what I discover in its pages is real.

The truth is that the world and our fantasies often overlap.

The secret to creativity is not in the so-called higher cognitive processes but in the dreamlike reconfigurations of emotional meanings that take place unconsciously

The pleasure was in the staging, the idea of ourselves as a repetition of others. I knew this without saying it, felt my femininity as the game of all women, a mysterious identification in which I lost myself.

Eu cautam o cale care sa ma duca inlauntrul unui om.

It appears that time has turned that young woman, who imagined herself a romantic heroine, into something of a comic character, but I remain fond of her. We are relatives, after all.

Y cuanto más vivo más convencido estoy de que cuando digo yo en realidad estoy diciendo nosotros.

Within weeks of my arrival in New York, I was someone else, not because there had been a revolution in my psychological makeup or any trauma. It was simply this: people saw me in a light in which I had never been seen before.

There is no perception without memory. But good art surprise us. Good art reorients our expectations, forces us to break the pattern, to see in a new way.

Transformation of the self are related to where you are, and identity Is dependent on others.

This feeling of being "home at last" corresponds to my idea about the city, and idea shaped by books, movies, and plays, an idea of infinite possibility.

I was happy without having sought happiness.

Each had his own language for seeing, and that language created vision. We all inherit vision just as they did - two men who stood side by side but were nevertheless separated by and intellectual chasm.

Every reader writes the book he or she reads, supplying what isn't there, and that creative invention becomes the book.

I loved it so much I was sorry to finish it. I closed the book and shocked myself by thinking, This is better than life. I didn't mean or want to think this, but I'm afraid I did. Certainly this feeling about a book is the one that makes people want to write. I don't know why I feel more alive when I write, but I do.

Maybe the world isn't enough, or maybe the distinction between the world and fiction is not so clear. Fiction is made from the stuff of the world, after all, which includes dreams and wishes and fantasies and memory. And it is never really made alone, but from the material between and among us: language.

The page can resurrect what's lost and what's dead, what's not there anymore and what was never there.