Quotes From "A Plea For Eros: Essays" By Siri Hustvedt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The advice is a call to empathy, the ultimate act of the imagination, and the true ground of all fiction. Siri Hustvedt

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

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

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

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

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

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

No doubt I would have felt reverent in less lovely places, because I imagined a past I connected to myself. Siri Hustvedt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The stories and pictures I make for the lives of the people closest to me are the forms of my empathy. Siri Hustvedt

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

If not violently overthrown, expectation can have a power in itself, can invest a place with what literally isn't there. Siri Hustvedt

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

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

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