Siri Hustvedt Quotes

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

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

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.

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.

Writing fiction is like remembering what never happened.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Memory changes as a person matures.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.