Siri Hustvedt Quotes & Sayings

“Children are not in a position to assess risk and safety; it must be done for them, and it must be done carefully.”

“American mass media culture, with its celebrities, shopping hysteria, sound bites, formulaic plots, received ideas, and nauseating repetitions, depresses me.”

“It is tempting to think of this form of insomnia, the inability to fall asleep, as a disease of agency and control: the inability to relinquish high self-reflexive consciousness for the vulnerable, ignorant regions of slumber in which we know not what we do.”

“That's one of the great lies of intimacy, to pretend you know everything - you cannot. No matter how close you've been, over however many years, there remain secrets. I think we all know that - that you don't tell everybody everything.”

“When I taught writing classes to psychiatric patients, I met people whose stories of manic highs and immobilizing lows appeared to be textbook descriptions of classic bipolar disorder. I met other patients who had been diagnosed with myriad disorders. No doctor seemed to agree about what they actually suffered from.”

“Although sometimes the morbid is also the transcendent, the transcendent cannot be reduced to the morbid.”

“Creativity has always depended on openness and flexibility, so let us hope for more of both in the future.”

“Each person does see the world in a different way. There is not a single, unifying, objective truth. We're all limited by our perspective.”

“Every mental state is also physical.”

“Every time I finish a book, I say to an imaginary god that I do not believe in, 'Please let me live to write another one.'”