106 Quotes & Sayings By Siri Hustvedt

Siri Hustvedt is the author of six novels, including "The Sorrows of an American," which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has received several awards for her work, including the French Prix Medicis Etranger in 2005, the Frankfurt Book Prize in 2002, the Bunting Fellowship in fiction in 1997, and the Lannan Literary Fiction Award in 1997. Her short stories have appeared in "The New Yorker."

There is no future without a past, because what is...
1
There is no future without a past, because what is to be cannot be imagined except as a form of repetition. Siri Hustvedt
Not telling is just as interesting as telling I have...
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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. Siri Hustvedt
3
We chart delusions through collective agreement. Siri Hustvedt
I was happy without having sought happiness.
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I was happy without having sought happiness. Siri Hustvedt
5
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, beginning another life. I worshipped the place. I feasted on every beautiful inch of it - the crowds, the fruit and vegetable stands, the miles of pavement, the graffiti, even the garbage. All of it sent me into paroxysms of joy. Needless to say, my elevation had an irrational cast to it. Had I not arrived laden with ideas of urban paradise, I might have felt bad losing sleep, might have felt lonely and disoriented, but instead I walked around town like a love-struck idiot, inhaling the difference between there and here. Siri Hustvedt
6
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 I wouldn't trade it for anything. I don't even wish now that I had more money. And had I been asked if I was suffering at the time, I would have said a defiant no. Siri Hustvedt
7
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. Students were reading and working, and those lit windows gave me a wonderful, weightless feeling. I understood for the first time how happy I had been there - in the library. Siri Hustvedt
We are all dying one by one. We all smell...
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We are all dying one by one. We all smell of mortality, and we can't wash it off. Siri Hustvedt
I will turn human anatomy into roses and stars and...
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I will turn human anatomy into roses and stars and sea. I will dissect the beloveds body in metaphor. Siri Hustvedt
A book is a collaboration between the one who reads...
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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. Siri Hustvedt
Every reader writes the book he or she reads, supplying...
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Every reader writes the book he or she reads, supplying what isn't there, and that creative invention becomes the book. Siri Hustvedt
Pain is always emotional. Fear and depression keep constant company...
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Pain is always emotional. Fear and depression keep constant company with chronic hurting. Siri Hustvedt
Dreams are stories made by and for the dreamer, and...
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Dreams are stories made by and for the dreamer, and each dreamer has his own folds to open and knots to untie. Siri Hustvedt
Dreaming is another form of thinking, more concrete, more economical,...
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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. Siri Hustvedt
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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 polish to our tarnished lives, and sometimes we may choose one dream over another, and in the choosing find some respite from ordinary sadness. After all, we, none of us, can ever untangle the knot of fictions that make up that wobbly thing we call a self. Siri Hustvedt
16
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 only take place when we're awake. I believe meaning is what the mind makes and wants. It's essential to perception and to consciousness in all its forms. But the important meanings of psychotherapy are subjective. There's a lot of research that confirms that drem content reflects the dreamer's emotional conflicts. Siri Hustvedt
Libraries are sexual dream factories. The langour brings it on.
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Libraries are sexual dream factories. The langour brings it on. Siri Hustvedt
Are not dreams as much a part of living as...
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Are not dreams as much a part of living as waking life is? Siri Hustvedt
Fiction is necessary to life - not only as books...
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Fiction is necessary to life - not only as books but as dreams, dreams that frame the world and give it meaning. Siri Hustvedt
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In order to be accepted, women must compensate for their ambition and strength by being nice. Men don't have to be nearly as much d as women. I do not believe women are natively nicer than men. They may learn that niceness brings rewards and hat names ambition is often punished. They may ingratiate themselves because such behavior is rewarded and a strategy of stealth may lead to better results than being forthright, but even when women are open and direct, they are not always seen or heard. Siri Hustvedt
I am fascinated that no one I have read seems...
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I am fascinated that no one I have read seems to have noticed that the literature on Picasso continually turns grown-up women into girls. Siri Hustvedt
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No one rejoices more in revenge than women, wrote Juvenal. Women do most delight in revenge, wrote Sir Thomas Browne. Sweet is revenge, especially to women, wrote Lord Byron. And I say, I wonder why, boys. I wonder why. Siri Hustvedt
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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. Siri Hustvedt
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Artists are cannibals. We consume other artists, and they become part of us–flesh and bone–only to be spewed out again in our own works. Siri Hustvedt
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The best works of art are never innocuous: they alter the viewer's perceptual predictions. It is only when the patterns of our vision are disrupted that we truly pay attention and must ask ourselves what we are looking at. Siri Hustvedt
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The history of art is full of women lying around naked for erotic consumption by men. Siri Hustvedt
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There is no perception without memory. But good art surprise us. Good art reorients our expectations, forces us to break the pattern, to see in a new way. Siri Hustvedt
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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. Siri Hustvedt
29
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] . Siri Hustvedt
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I see what I did not see. I experience that which is outside my own experience. This is the magic of reading novels. This is the working out of the problem of illusion. I take a book off the shelf. I open it up and begin to read, and what I discover in its pages is real. Siri Hustvedt
31
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 have alarmed her, I had a funny feeling that by taking on the English novelist I was returning to my Norwegian roots. Siri Hustvedt
32
Maybe the world isn't enough, or maybe the distinction between the world and fiction is not so clear. Fiction is made from the stuff of the world, after all, which includes dreams and wishes and fantasies and memory. And it is never really made alone, but from the material between and among us: language. Siri Hustvedt
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Only the unprotected self can feel joy. Siri Hustvedt
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The fictive is an emormous territory it turns out, its boundaries vague, and there is little certainty about where it begins and ends. Siri Hustvedt
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The tangible and intangible collide to cast a spell. But can a person or thing ever be stripped naked? Can we ever discover reality hiding under the meanings we give to people and things? I don't think so. And I don't think Fitzgerald thought so either. His book meditates on the necessity of fiction, not only as lies but as truths. Siri Hustvedt
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The advice is a call to empathy, the ultimate act of the imagination, and the true ground of all fiction. Siri Hustvedt
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The very idea of a library for me is bound to my mother and father and includes the history of my own metamorphosis through books, fictions that are no less part of me than much of my own history. Siri Hustvedt
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But that's why you're upset now. Fiction is not life.'' You don't believe that.'' I think I do.'' You know as well as I do that the line can't be drawn, that we're infected at every moment by fictions of all kinds, that it's inescapable.'' Don't be a sophist, ' he said. 'There is a world and it's palpable.'' I don't mean that, ' I said. 'I mean that it's hard really to see it, that it's all hazy with out dreams and fantasies. . Siri Hustvedt
39
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. Siri Hustvedt
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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 fantasies damage the case for equality, and even when they are seen as the result of a "sick society, " the peculiarity of our sexual actions or fantasies is not easily untangled or explained away. The ground from which they spring is simply too muddy. Acts can be controlled, but not desire. Sexual feeling pops up, in spite of our politics. Siri Hustvedt
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The Singularity is at once an escape and a birth fantasy. I said to him: A Zeus dream that avoids the organic body altogether. Brand-new creatures burst forth from men's heads. Presto! The mother and her evil vagina disappears. Siri Hustvedt
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My purely practical advice: Don't get excited. Don't raise your voice. Bite back. Bite back hard, but never cry. Siri Hustvedt
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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. Siri Hustvedt
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Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense. Siri Hustvedt
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Because I knew so much about him, because I had been close to him, I couldn't bring the various fragments of my experience with him into a single coherent image. The truth was mobile and contradictory, and I was willing to live with that. Siri Hustvedt
46
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. Siri Hustvedt
47
I read the stories I've been told in my own way and make a narrative of them. Narrative is a chain of links, and I link furiously, merrily hurdling over holes, gaps, and secrets. Nevertheless, I try to remind myself that the holes are there. They are always there, not only in the lives of others but in my own life as well. Siri Hustvedt
48
The truth is that what fascinates me is not so much being in a place as not being there: how places live in the mind once you have left them, how they are imagined before you arrive, or how they are seemingly called out of nothing to illustrate a thought or story like my tree down yonder. These mental spaces map our Innes lives more fully than any "real" map, delineating the borders of here and there that also shape what we see in the present. Siri Hustvedt
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Immigration inevitably involves error and revision. What I imagined it would be, it's not. For better or worse, some mistake is unavoidable. Siri Hustvedt
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No doubt I would have felt reverent in less lovely places, because I imagined a past I connected to myself. Siri Hustvedt
51
I imagined Stephen's companion was a beautiful woman. Her form and coloring changed with my moving thoughts, but the idea that she existed remained to nag at me, and even though she was only a spook of my jealousy, I couldn't stop the surge of fantasies about her and Stephen. By the time I left the library, I had invented several elaborate plots involving the two of them. Siri Hustvedt
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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. Siri Hustvedt
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Memory is essential to who we are, and memories can be both implicit and explicit - unconscious and conscious. Siri Hustvedt
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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. Siri Hustvedt
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Memory changes as a person matures. Siri Hustvedt
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Infancy is irretrievable. Its memories live underground. To what extent they return by stealth or are triggered by various catalysts remains an ongoing question. Siri Hustvedt
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What she remembered is undoubtedly something so radically different from the image I gave to her memory that the two may be incompatible. Siri Hustvedt
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My memory of the school building itself, its rooms and lockers, blackboards, and hallways, bring on a heavy, oppressive feeling. Whether I was more unhappy in school than any of my friends I don't know. I never would have said I didn't like school, and there are moments I distinctly remember enjoying, but these truths don't alter my memory of that place. Siri Hustvedt
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It can only be that places left behind often become emotionally simplified - that they sound a single note of pain or pleasure, which means that they are never what they were. Siri Hustvedt
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It may be that I link every library to that first one - to my early childhood experience of drawing on the floor near my father's desk. A library is of course a real place, but it is also an unreal one. What happens there is mostly silent. I think I've always liked the whispering aspect of libraries, the hushing librarians and my feeling of solitude among many. Siri Hustvedt
61
Do you know that I can't 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.'' Don't you have a photograph?'' Photographs! ' He spat out the word. 'I'm talking about true recollection - seeing the face. Siri Hustvedt
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In this early memory he looks different from the way I would remember him later. Siri Hustvedt
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True 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. Siri Hustvedt
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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. Siri Hustvedt
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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. Siri Hustvedt
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Distortion is part of desire. We always change the things we want. Siri Hustvedt
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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. 'That's what desire is, isn't it? The lack of something. Siri Hustvedt
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Crippled and crazy, we hobble toward the finish line, pen in hand. Siri Hustvedt
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Correlation is not cause, it is just a 'music of chance'. Siri Hustvedt
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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. Siri Hustvedt
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Accumulated experience always alters perception of the past. Siri Hustvedt
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Every sickness has an alien quality, a feeling of invasion and loss of control that is evident in the language we use about it. Siri Hustvedt
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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. Siri Hustvedt
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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. Siri Hustvedt
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There's a phenomenology of being sick, one that depends on temperament, personal history, and the culture which we live in. Siri Hustvedt
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Transformation of the self are related to where you are, and identity Is dependent on others. Siri Hustvedt
77
My mother said the bizarre name Raccoona had surely been inspired, at least on a subliminal level, by the masks raccoons don't 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. . Siri Hustvedt
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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. Siri Hustvedt
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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. Siri Hustvedt
80
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. Siri Hustvedt
81
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. Siri Hustvedt
82
We all start out the same in our mothers' wombs. We, all of us, when floating in the amniotic sea of our earliest oblivion, have gonads. If the Y chromosome didn't swoop in to act on the gonads of some of us and make testes, we would all become women. In biology, the Genesis story is reversed: Adam becomes Adam out of Eve, not the other way around. Siri Hustvedt
83
The stories and pictures I make for the lives of the people closest to me are the forms of my empathy. Siri Hustvedt
84
It encapsulates so neatly the lesson of expectation and reality that it could serve as a parable. The fact that tomatoes are good is beside the point. If you think you're getting an apple, a tomato will revolt you. That New York should be nicknamed the Big Apple, that an apple is the fruit of humankind's first error and the expulsion from paradise, that America and paradise have been linked and confused ever since Europeans first hit its shores, makes the story reverberate as myth. . Siri Hustvedt
85
If not violently overthrown, expectation can have a power in itself, can invest a place with what literally isn't there. Siri Hustvedt
86
I had never seen anything like New York, and its newness held the promise of my future: dense with the experience I craved - romantic, urbane, intellectual. Looking back on that moment, I believe I was saved from disappointment by the nature of my "great expectations." I honestly wasn't burdened with conventional notions of finding security and happiness. At that time of my life, even when I was "happy, " it wasn't because I expected it. That was for characters less romantic than myself. I didn't expect to be rich, well fed, and kindly treated by all. I wanted to live deeply and fully, to embrace whatever the city held for me. Siri Hustvedt
87
I've always thought of wholeness and integration as necessary myths. We're fragmented beings who cement ourselves together, but there are always cracks. Living with the cracks is part of being, well, reasonably healthy Siri Hustvedt
88
Insanity is a state of profound self-absorption. Siri Hustvedt
89
Again, I don't fully understand my emotion response to the library or trust it. It was the site of a series of intellectual revelations that were crucial to me, not just as a student but as a human being. Siri Hustvedt
90
I said very little. I knew that for the time being I was the open air, the place to put the words, not a real interlocutor. And then, ekthout a transition of any kind, she began to tell me. ... {p. 134} Siri Hustvedt
91
New York City is the place where people come to invent, reinvent, or find the room they need to be who they wish to be. Siri Hustvedt
92
But all attractions are alike, ' he said. 'They come from an emptiness inside.' He hammered on this chest with his index finger. 'Something's missing and you have to fill it. Books, paintings, people, they're all the same..'' A lot of people do without books and paintings.'' True, ' he said, 'but that doesn't affect the argument.' Paris turned his head to one side and chewed on his lip. 'Of course, nothing ever does the trick. Nobody's really satisfied for long. Siri Hustvedt
93
Creativity has always depended on openness and flexibility, so let us hope for more of both in the future. Siri Hustvedt
94
Most of us accept that although we may believe our dreams to be real events, upon waking, we can tell the difference between nocturnal hallucinations and reality. Siri Hustvedt
95
There is no reason we should expect young children to enter the nocturnal darkness of sleep and dreams without help. Siri Hustvedt
96
The English expression 'to fall asleep' is apt because the transition between waking and sleeping is a gradual drop from one state of being into another: a giving up of full self-consciousness for unconsciousness or for the altered consciousness of dreams. Siri Hustvedt
97
Henry Miller is a famous writer whose work has fallen out of fashion, but I strongly recommend that readers who don't know his work pick up a book and experience this writer's zealous, crazy, inventive, funny, sexy, often delirious prose. Siri Hustvedt
98
All human states are organic brain states - happiness, sadness, fear, lust, dreaming, doing math problems and writing novels - and our brains are not static. Siri Hustvedt
99
The idea that skiing might not be fun, might not be for everyone, had never occurred to me. Where I come from, the sport signified pleasure, nature, family happiness. Siri Hustvedt
100
I am always suspicious of those who impose 'rules' on child rearing. Every child is different in terms of temperament and learning, and every parent responds to a particular child, not some generalized infant or youngster. Siri Hustvedt