“ 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 be… Siri Hustvedt
“ 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,… 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 wa… 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
“ 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 wi… 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
“ 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 som… Siri Hustvedt
“ 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… 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 ha… 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
“ 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
“ 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 o… Siri Hustvedt
“ Transformation of the self are related to where you are, and identity Is dependent on others. Siri Hustvedt
“ There's a phenomenology of being sick, one that depends on temperament, personal history, and the culture which we live in. Siri Hustvedt
“ 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
“ 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 say… Siri Hustvedt
“ 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
“ 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
