Siri Hustvedt Quotes - Page 3

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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]

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.