285 Quotes by Siri Hustvedt

I’ve always thought that love thrives on a certain kind of distance, that it requires an awed separateness to continue. Without that necessary remove, the physical minutiae of the other person grows ugly in its magnification.

But spectacular lies don’t need to be perfect. They rely less on the liar’s skill than on the listener’s expectations and wishes. After Mark’s dishonesty was exposed, I understood how much I wised that what he had told me had been true.

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.

Very simply, for the mind, absence can be a catalyst for presence.

Six months isn’t such a long time. That’s how long it’s been since I came to see you in May, but the fact is it’s been much longer than that. We’ve spent years living inside each other.

Memory offers up its gifts only when jogged by something in the present. It isn’t a storehouse of fixed images and words, but a dynamic associative network in the brain that is never quiet and is subject to revision each time we retrieve an old picture or old words.

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.

I suppose we are all products of our parents’ joy and suffering. Their emotions are written into us, as much as the inscriptions made by their genes.

His was an illness that besets the intellectual: the indefatigable will to mastery. Chronic and incurable, it afflicts those who lust after a world that makes sense.