Top 100 Siri Hustvedt Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Siri Hustvedt

2. “Writing fiction is like remembering what never happened.”

— Siri Hustvedt

3. “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

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

— Siri Hustvedt

5. “El amor es la cura, pero el odio a menudo forma parte del proceso.”

— Siri Hustvedt

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

— Siri Hustvedt

7. “Great books are the ones that are urgent, life-changing, the ones that crack open the reader’s skull and heart.”

— Siri Hustvedt

8. “Being a mother is complicated because its not just a paternal culture making demands on you; its those internal demands and expectations that women have and are self-generated.”

— Siri Hustvedt

9. “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

10. “I had left small-town, rural life for good, and I had no intention of ever returning, not because I didn’t like my home but because I had always known that I would leave. Leaving was part of my life romance, part of an idea I had about myself as a person destined for adventure; and as far as I could tell, adventure lay in the urban wilds of Manhattan, not in the farmland of Minnesota.”

— Siri Hustvedt

Featured in: Romance Quotes

11. “The genius of women has always been easy to discount, suppress, or attribute to the nearest man. When.”

— Siri Hustvedt

12. “It has taken me a very long time, a very long time to give myself permission to fly and breathe fire.”

— Siri Hustvedt

13. “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

14. “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

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

— Siri Hustvedt

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

— Siri Hustvedt

17. “Human beings are repetitive animals. All meaning is generated through repetition.”

— Siri Hustvedt

18. “Like countless first-year medical students, immersed in the symptoms of one disease after another, I am alert to the tingles and pangs, the throbs and quivers of my mortal body, each one of which is potentially a sign of the end.”

— Siri Hustvedt

19. “All thoughts of revenge are born of the pain of helplessness. ‘I suffer’ becomes ‘You will suffer’. And let us not lie: Vengeance is invigorating. It focuses and enlivens us, and it quashes grief because it turns the emotion outward. In grief we go to pieces. In revenge we come together as a single pointed weapon aimed at a target. However destructive in the long run, it serves a useful purpose for a time.”

— Siri Hustvedt

20. “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

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

— Siri Hustvedt

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

— Siri Hustvedt

23. “Being alive is inexplicable, I thought. Consciousness itself is inexplicable. There is nothing ordinary in the world.”

— Siri Hustvedt

24. “Every painting is always two paintings: The one you see, and the one you remember.”

— Siri Hustvedt

25. “Memory is essential to who we are, and memories can be both implicit and explicit – unconscious and conscious.”

— Siri Hustvedt

26. “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

27. “Reading is perception as translation. The inert signs of an alphabet become living meanings in the mind.”

— Siri Hustvedt

28. “Dreams are stories made by and for the dreamer...”

— Siri Hustvedt

29. “The history of art is full of women lying around naked for erotic consumption by men.”

— Siri Hustvedt

30. “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

31. “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.”

— Siri Hustvedt

32. “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

33. “I’ve always thought that love thrives on a certain kind of distance, that it requires an awed separateness to continue. Without that necessary remove, the physical minutiae of the other person grows ugly in its magnification.”

— Siri Hustvedt

34. “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.”

— Siri Hustvedt

35. “Time is not outside us, but inside. Only we live with past, present, and future, and the present is too brief to experience anyway; it is retained afterward and then it is either codified or it slips into amnesia.”

— Siri Hustvedt

36. “Who had read my poems, who held my hand, who was dead before he could visit me in the hospital where he had been, too, landed, too, on his flights to heaven and drops into hell.”

— Siri Hustvedt

37. “She meant that if your conscience holds you back, if it muddles the purity of your desire, if it gives you mixed feelings, don’t do it.”

— Siri Hustvedt

38. “We chart delusions through collective agreement.”

— Siri Hustvedt

39. “I’ve decided that mixing is a key term. It’s better than suggestion, which is one-sided. It explains what people rarely talk about, because we define ourselves as isolated, closed bodies who bump up against each other but stay shut. Descartes was wrong. It isn’t: I think, there I am. It’s: I am because you are. That’s Hegel – well, the short version.”

— Siri Hustvedt

40. “Do you remember when you told me I had beautiful knees? I never like my knees. In fact, I thought they were ugly. But your eyes have rehabilitated them. Whether I see you again or not, I’m going to live out my life with these two beautiful knees.”

— Siri Hustvedt

41. “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

42. “Intellectual curiosity about one’s own illness is certainly born of a desire for mastery. If I couldn’t cure myself, perhaps I could at least begin to understand myself.”

— Siri Hustvedt

43. “My purely practical advice: Don’t get excited. Don’t raise your voice. Bite back. Bite back hard, but never cry.”

— Siri Hustvedt

44. “Six months isn’t such a long time. That’s how long it’s been since I came to see you in May, but the fact is it’s been much longer than that. We’ve spent years living inside each other.”

— Siri Hustvedt

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

— Siri Hustvedt

46. “Tolerating cracks is part of being alive.”

— Siri Hustvedt

47. “As John Ashbery once said, “Being a famous poet is the not the same thing as being famous.”

— Siri Hustvedt

48. “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

49. “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

50. “Memory changes as a person matures.”

— Siri Hustvedt