Siri hustvedt quotes

Time is not outside us, but inside. Only we live with past, present, and future, and the present is too brief to experience anyway; it is retained afterward and then it is either codified or it slips into amnesia.

Our brain and our whole nervous system and our whole body are only created in relation to other people and to the environment. So what we have here is an enormously complex notion of both consciousness and unconsciousness. That's why these models get very difficult, because you can't reduce our subjective and intersubjective experience to neural reductions.

We lose ourselves in stories; that's the beauty of literary art.

Memory offers up its gifts only when jogged by something in the present. It isn't a storehouse of fixed images and words, but a dynamic associative network in the brain that is never quiet and is subject to revision each time we retrieve an old picture or old words.

We chart delusions through collective agreement.

Demonstration of mastery gives a feeling of power and that feeling of power is a good feeling.

I've often thought that one of us is what we imagine, that each of us normalizes the terrible strangeness of inner life with a variety of convenient fictions.

We read each other through our eyes, and anatomically they are an extension of our brains. When we catch someone's eye, we look into a mind.

There's a phenomenology of being sick, one that depends on temperament, personal history, and the culture which we live in.

Women really are not supposed to be imaginative. That creativity of this kind is supposed to belong to men. You know, because women make babies. I find the double standards shocking.

I will turn human anatomy into roses and stars and sea. I will dissect the beloveds body in metaphor.

I think that it's important for people to read philosophy and literature is not because I think everyone should be a well-rounded human being, but because it will help you think better about what you are doing.

Many writers over the centuries simply do not have the reputations they deserve because they were female, and that is an act of suppression.

Widowers marry again because it makes their lives easier. Widows often don't, because it makes their lives harder. [p. 61]

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

Every painting is always two paintings: The one you see, and the one you remember.

Men generally do not see women as competition.

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.

Memory is essential to who we are, and memories can be both implicit and explicit - unconscious and conscious.

Human beings are repetitive animals. All meaning is generated through repetition.

I remember thinking how easy it is to speak in clichés, to steal a line from pulp fiction and let it fall. We can only hover around the inexpressible with our words anyway, and there is comfort in saying what we have heard before.

Whenever I sign books, I get this line over and over again from men: "I don't read fiction, but my wife does. Would you sign the book to her?" What are those men doing there? And where are their wives?

Ture 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.

No matter how brilliant or accomplished they are, there is something emasculating for men in being pitted against a woman. It is even more true in creative fields already considered to be "squishy" and feminine, and it's a big problem because great women have been left off the record.

The faculty of memory cannot be separated from the imagination. They go hand in hand. To one degree or another, we all invent our personal pasts. And for most of us those pasts are built from emotionally colored memories.

There is no future without a past, because what is to be cannot be imagined except as a form of repetition.

Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.

Being a mother is complicated because its not just a paternal culture making demands on you; its those internal demands and expectations that women have and are self-generated.

I've always thought of wholeness and integration as necessary myths. We're gragmented beings who cement ourselves together, but there are always cracks. Living with the cracks is part of being, well, reasonably healthy.

Correlation is not cause, it is just a 'music of chance'.

Crippled and crazy, we hobble toward the finish line, pen in hand.

Writing fiction is like remembering what never happened.

Great books are the ones that are urgent, life-changing, the ones that crack open the reader’s skull and heart.

Depression is when you think there's nothing to be done. Fortunately I always think there's something to be done.

The recollections of an older man are different from those of a younger man. What seemed vital at forty may lose its significance at seventy. We manufacture stories, after all, from the fleeting sensory material that bombards us at every instant, a fragmented series of pictures, conversations, odors, and the touch of things and people. We delete most of it to live with some semblance of order, and the reshuffling of memory goes on until we die.

After years of having immersed myself in science, I do think that if you master several different ways of thinking, it makes your own thought processes more agile.

Pain is always emotional. Fear and depression keep constant company with chronic hurting.

Every one of us is prone to implicit sexual prejudices, including women.

That night as I lay in bed, I thought of several things I could have said and mourned the fact that my wit usually bloomed late, peaking when it no longer mattered, during the solitary hours close to midnight.

Memory changes as a person matures.

I think because mothers usually are the people who take care of us when we're little, and when we're little those mothers are omnipotent, perhaps men even more than women don't like to think about that dependency. That dependency is horror.

There is no reason we should expect young children to enter the nocturnal darkness of sleep and dreams without help.

A book is a collaboration between the one who reads and what is read and, at its best, that coming together is a love story like any other.

The old story is true:Women have to be less emotional than men.

There is this assumption that much of what I write is about my life, and that simply is not true.

That is the strangeness of language: it crosses the boundaries of the body, is at once inside and outside, and it sometimes happens that we don't notice the threshold has been crossed.

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

Dreaming is another form of thinking, more concrete, more economical, more visual, and often more emotional than the thoughts of the day, but a thinking through of the day, nevertheless.

It is fascinating to me that when the lists of the great writers are trotted out year after year, you often find lists without a single woman mentioned.

Dreams are stories made by and for the dreamer, and each dreamer has his own folds to open and knots to untie.

Like countless first-year medical students, immersed in the symptoms of one disease after another, I am alert to the tingles and pangs, the throbs and quivers of my mortal body, each one of which is potentially a sign of the end.

The logic: Reading is a private pursuit, one that often takes place behind closed doors. A young lady might retreat with a book, might even take it into her boudoir, and there, reclining on here silken sheets, imbibing the thrills and chills manufactured by writerly quills, one of her hands, one not absolutely needed to grip the little volume, might wander. The fear, in short, as one-handed reading. [p. 146]

We sometimes imagine we want what we don't really want.

All human states are organic brain states - happiness, sadness, fear, lust, dreaming, doing math problems and writing novels - and our brains are not static.

Reading is a private pursuit; one that takes place behind closed doors.

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

I don't want the words to be naked the way they are in faxes or in the computer. I want them to be covered by an envelope that you have to rip open in order to get at. I want there to be a waiting time -a pause between the writing and the reading. I want us to be careful about what we say to each other. I want the miles between us to be real and long. This will be our law -that we write our dailiness and our suffering very, very carefully.

The truth is that personality inevitably bleeds into all forms of our intellectual life. We all extrapolate from our own lives in order to understand the world.

Reading is perception as translation. The inert signs of an alphabet become living meanings in the mind.

I myself have perceived women's actions as more aggressive than I would have in men because I too am walking around with my own biases. The way to fight them is to become conscious of them.

Every sickness has an alien quality, a feeling of invasion and loss of control that is evident in the language we use about it.

Bedtime rituals for children ease the way to the elsewhere of slumber - teeth brushing and pajamas, the voice of a parent reading, the feel and smell of the old blanket or toy, the nightlight glowing in a corner.

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.

Dreams are stories made by and for the dreamer.

Intellectual curiosity about one's own illness is certainly born of a desire for mastery. If I couldn't cure myself, perhaps I could at least begin to understand myself.

Good books, written by men or women, are ones in which you lose consciousness of the person writing the sentences.