Top 100 Siri Hustvedt Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “My mother’s idiosyncratic definition of the word is the following: we all suffer and we all die.“Never, ever,” my mother said to me when I was eleven,“say ‘pass away’ for ‘to die.’ People die. They don’t evaporate.”

— Siri Hustvedt

52. “Fiction is not an escape from the world either. Imaginary experience is also experience. O.”

— Siri Hustvedt

53. “The articulation of the other’s body in words turns it into a map of possible pleasure, effectively distancing that body by transforming it into an erotic object.”

— Siri Hustvedt

54. “Very simply, for the mind, absence can be a catalyst for presence.”

— Siri Hustvedt

55. “First loves are often terrible, probably because they are first and there is no conscious history into which they may be absorbed.”

— Siri Hustvedt

56. “I suppose we are all products of our parents’ joy and suffering. Their emotions are written into us, as much as the inscriptions made by their genes.”

— Siri Hustvedt

57. “The misery I felt was grief. I wanted her back, my old self.”

— Siri Hustvedt

58. “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

59. “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

60. “He hunched his shoulders and looked at the floor. With that movement, he entered the past. When he put on his jacket, kissed me again, and walked to the door, he was already a memory.”

— Siri Hustvedt

61. “I’ve always thought of wholeness and integration as necessary myths. We’re gragmented beings who cement ourselves together, but there are always cracks. Living with the cracks is part of being, well, reasonably healthy.”

— Siri Hustvedt

62. “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

63. “There’s a phenomenology of being sick, one that depends on temperament, personal history, and the culture which we live in.”

— Siri Hustvedt

64. “Medicine had granted permission to a fantasy that men have never abandoned, a muddled version of what Pygmalion wanted – something between a real woman and a beautiful thing.”

— Siri Hustvedt

65. “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

66. “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

67. “Forgetting,” I said, “is probably as much a part of life as remembering. We’re all amnesiacs.”

— Siri Hustvedt

68. “We are all wishful creatures, and we wish backward, too, not only forward, and thereby rebuild the curious, crumbling architecture of memory into structures that are more habitable.”

— Siri Hustvedt

69. “We had been pulled apart by absence, but that same absence had shackled us together for life.”

— Siri Hustvedt

70. “Aggressive questions are usually pedagogic – that is, the answer has already been written in the mind of the questioner, who then waits with a reply. It’s pretend listening.”

— Siri Hustvedt

71. “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

72. “But we all live there, I thought to myself, in the imaginary stories we tell ourselves about our lives.”

— Siri Hustvedt

73. “There is this assumption that much of what I write is about my life, and that simply is not true.”

— Siri Hustvedt

74. “Sometimes even now I think I see him in the street or standing in a window or bent over a book in a coffee shop. And in that instant, before I understand that it’s someone else, my lungs tighten and I lose my breath.”

— Siri Hustvedt

75. “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

76. “I had read my way not to knowledge but into an inscrutable oblivion.”

— Siri Hustvedt

77. “I was afraid of it, because I liked it. It excited me.”

— Siri Hustvedt

78. “Emotion is always part of perception, not distinct from it.”

— Siri Hustvedt

79. “It’s odd the way life works, the way it mutates and wanders, the way one thing becomes another.”

— Siri Hustvedt

80. “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

81. “We sometimes imagine we want what we don’t really want.”

— Siri Hustvedt

82. “But spectacular lies don’t need to be perfect. They rely less on the liar’s skill than on the listener’s expectations and wishes. After Mark’s dishonesty was exposed, I understood how much I wised that what he had told me had been true.”

— Siri Hustvedt

83. “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

84. “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

85. “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

86. “I have begun to wonder what actually happens in our brains when we return to half-remembered places. What is memory’s perspective? Does the man revise the boy’s view or is the imprint relatively static, a vestige of what was once intimately known?”

— Siri Hustvedt

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

— Siri Hustvedt

88. “People imagine that hope has degrees, but I think not. There is hope and there is no hope.”

— Siri Hustvedt

89. “When you’re young, I think it’s harder to know what you want, how much of others you’re willing to take in. When I was living in Paris, I tried on ideas about myself like dresses. I was always reinventing who I was.”

— Siri Hustvedt

90. “His was an illness that besets the intellectual: the indefatigable will to mastery. Chronic and incurable, it afflicts those who lust after a world that makes sense.”

— Siri Hustvedt

91. “Reading is a private pursuit; one that takes place behind closed doors.”

— Siri Hustvedt

92. “But mixing is the way of the world. The world passes through us – food, books, pictures, other people.”

— Siri Hustvedt

93. “I don’t know why you are better and more beautiful than anybody else.”

— Siri Hustvedt

94. “Drowning, she clung fiercely to that small, splintered piece of mast bobbing in the ocean we call justice. There is no justice, of course, or very little of it, and counting on it as a life raft is a big mistake.”

— Siri Hustvedt

95. “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

96. “I’m fond of that little scene. Whether my memory is completely accurate or not, it has a sharpness that nothing I look at now can possibly have.”

— Siri Hustvedt

97. “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

98. “The place where I am is missing from my view. It’s like that for everybody. We don’t see ourselves in the picture, do we? It’s a kind of hole.”

— Siri Hustvedt

99. “And perception is a complex phenomenon. Our brains are not cameras or recording devices. Visual perception is active and shaped by both conscious and unconscious forces. Expectation is crucial to perceptual experience, and what to expect about how the world works is learned, and once something is learned well, it becomes unconscious.”

— Siri Hustvedt

100. “Most people aren’t attacked by colors.”

— Siri Hustvedt