Siri Hustvedt Quotes

"We chart delusions through collective agreement."

on Philosophy

"A book is a collaboration between the one who reads and what is read and, at its best, that coming together is a love story like any other."

on Love

"Every reader writes the book he or she reads, supplying what isn't there, and that creative invention becomes the book."

on Writing

"Artists are cannibals. We consume other artists, and they become part of us—flesh and bone—only to be spewed out again in our own works."

on Art

"Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense."

on Philosophy

"If not violently overthrown, expectation can have a power in itself, can invest a place with what literally isn't there."

on Philosophy

"Only the unprotected self can feel joy."

on Joy

"There is no future without a past, because what is to be cannot be imagined except as a form of repetition."

on Time

"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."

on Philosophy

"Are not dreams as much a part of living as waking life is?"

on Dreams

"Insanity is a state of profound self-absorption."

on Philosophy

"The stories and pictures I make for the lives of the people closest to me are the forms of my empathy."

on Art

"No doubt I would have felt reverent in less lovely places, because I imagined a past I connected to myself."

on Philosophy

"Accumulated experience always alters perception of the past."

on Philosophy

"Crippled and crazy, we hobble toward the finish line, pen in hand."

on Mental Health