“ 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 t… Siri Hustvedt
“ 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 emotiona… Siri Hustvedt
“ 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
“ 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 tim… Siri Hustvedt
“ My purely practical advice: Don't get excited. Don't raise your voice. Bite back. Bite back hard, but never cry. Siri Hustvedt
“ 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… 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 fa… 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
“ 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… 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
“ The advice is a call to empathy, the ultimate act of the imagination, and the true ground of all fiction. 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 thin… Siri Hustvedt
“ 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
“ 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 fanta… 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… 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… Siri Hustvedt
“ 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 silke… Siri Hustvedt
“ 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
“ 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
“ The history of art is full of women lying around naked for erotic consumption by men. Siri Hustvedt
