Siri Hustvedt
Siri Hustvedt
Siri Hustvedtis an American novelist and essayist. Hustvedt is the author of a book of poetry, six novels, two books of essays, and several works of non-fiction. Her books include: The Blindfold, The Enchantment of Lily Dahl, What I Loved, for which she is best known, A Plea for Eros, The Sorrows of an American, The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves, The Summer Without Men, Living, Thinking, Looking, and The Blazing World. What I Loved and The...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth19 February 1955
CityNorthfield, MN
CountryUnited States of America
There is a difference between using a made-up name and using real people as pseudonyms. People are not costumes you can wear. They are flesh and blood.
Dreams are stories made by and for the dreamer, and each dreamer has his own folds to open and knots to untie.
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.
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.
Every sickness has an alien quality, a feeling of invasion and loss of control that is evident in the language we use about it.
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.
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.
There's a phenomenology of being sick, one that depends on temperament, personal history, and the culture which we live in.
Great books are the ones that are urgent, life-changing, the ones that crack open the reader’s skull and heart.
Reading is perception as translation. The inert signs of an alphabet become living meanings in the mind.
under our love making I felt a bleakness that couldnt be dispelled. The sadness was in both of us, and I think we pitied ourselves that night, as if we were other people looking down on the couple who lay together on the bed
Reading is a private pursuit; one that takes place behind closed doors.
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.
We sometimes imagine we want what we don't really want.