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

Siri Hustvedt Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

— Siri Hustvedt

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

— Siri Hustvedt

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

— Siri Hustvedt

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

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

— 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

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

In a way,” I said to him, “that now you’re talking about hardly exists. We feel it, but it’s impossible to measure. The past is always eating up the present.

— Siri Hustvedt

With Stephen, I had become a sour, witless bore. With others, I could be light. Men I cared nothing about called me, and every once in a while, I accepted an invitation. On them my indifference worked like an aphrodisiac, Because I didn’t want anything, I felt free an jabbered away spinning out all kinds of silliness that seemed only to augment their desire.

— Siri Hustvedt

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

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

Art can speak to what falls outside theory, and it can also embody felt ideas.

— Siri Hustvedt

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

— Siri Hustvedt

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

Most people aren’t attacked by colors.

— Siri Hustvedt

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
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