Quotes by Siri Hustvedt

Do you know that I cant remember her face? Try as I may, it will not be conjured. I can tell you what she looked like; I can recite a description of her features, part by part, but I cannot evoke the whole face.Dont you have a photograph?Photographs! He spat out the word. Im talking about true recollection - seeing the face.

In this early memory he looks different from the way I would remember him later.

True stories cant be told forward, only backward. We invent them from the vantage point of an ever-changing present and tell ourselves how they unfolded.

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.

Old places fire the internal weather of our pasts. The mild winds, aching calms, and hard storms of forgotten emotions return to us when we return to the spots where they happened.

Distortion is part of desire. We always change the things we want.

I know, but he must have felt it that way, that evil was an emptiness, a lack of something, not a presence.He turned his head fast and looked at me. Thats what desire is, isnt it? The lack of something.

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

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

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.

Accumulated experience always alters perception of the past.

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

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.

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 dont notice the threshold has been crossed.

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

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

My mother said the bizarre name Raccoona had surely been inspired, at least on a subliminal level, by the masks raccoons dont wear but simply have - the ones given them by nature..... [S]he pointed out that Le Guin had suspected all along that Raccoona and Tiptree were two authors that came from the same source, but in a letter to Alice she wrote that she preferred Tiptree to Raccoona: Raccoona, I think, has less control, thus less wit and power.Le Guin, Mother said, had understood something deep. When you take on a male persona, something happens.When I asked her what that was, she sat back in her chair, waved her arm, and smiled. You get to be the father.

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.

The bottle of red brush on a white table gleamed throughout the remaining years of my childhood as the sign of what was possible there.

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.