Quotes by Siri Hustvedt

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

“I was happy without having sought happiness.”

“I had no friends. Was I happy? I was wildly happy. Sitting on my bed, which took up most of the space in that narrow room, I whispered prayers of thanks that I was really and truly here in New York...”

“It is true that I suffered in a difficult and stupid love affair and that I worked at one bad job after another to try to keep myself going. Nevertheless, I remember that time as extraordinary, and...”

“Walking across campus made me feel sad, and I thought to myself, I wasn't happy there. Then, after reading, we walked past Butler Library. It was dark, but the light inside illuminated the windows....”

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

“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.”

“We chart delusions through collective agreement.”

“We are all dying one by one. We all smell of mortality, and we can't wash it off.”

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

“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.”

“We must all allow ourselves the fantasy of projection from time to time, a chance to clothe ourselves in the imaginary gowns and tails of what has never been and never will be. This gives some poli...”

“I've come to think of consciousness as a continuum of states, from fully awake cogitation to daydreaming to the altered consciousness of hallucinations and dreams. Still, interpreting dreams can on...”

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

“Are not dreams as much a part of living as waking life is?”

“fiction is necessary to life - not only as books but as dreams, dreams that frame the world and give it meaning.”

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

“We drank coffee. We talked. She loved Charles Dickens, whom she read in Norwegian. Years after she was dead, I wrote a dissertation on Dickens, and though my study of the great man would no doubt h...”

“Feminism was good for me, as were any number of causes, but as I developed as a thinking person, the truisms and dogmas of every ideology became as worn as that book's cover.”

“When a culture oppresses women, and all do to one degree or another, it isn't convenient to acknowledge that there are women who like submission in bed or who have fantasies about rape. Masochistic...”