top of page

"But that's why you're upset now. Fiction is not life.''You don't believe that.''I think I do.''You know as well as I do that the line can't be drawn, that we're infected at every moment by fictions of all kinds, that it's inescapable.''Don't be a sophist,' he said. 'There is a world and it's palpable.''I don't mean that,' I said. 'I mean that it's hard really to see it, that it's all hazy with out dreams and fantasies."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Reality quotes

"The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party when the masks are dropped."

"Never expect people to understand, respect or love you , they are just a bunch of dirty flesh and fake skins. Staring to eat you when you are fat enough."

"It is hope--with regard to our careers, our love lives, our children, our politicians, and our planet--that is primarily to blame for angering and embittering us. The incompatibility between the grandeur of our aspirations and the mean reality of our condition generates the violent disappointments which rack our days and etch themselves in lines of acrimony across our faces."

"It is impossible for a man to outpace his shadow."
Explore more quotes by Siri Hustvedt


"There's a phenomenology of being sick, one that depends on temperament, personal history, and the culture which we live in."


"It is true that I suffered in a difficult and stupid love affair and that I worked at one bad job after another to try to keep myself going. Nevertheless, I remember that time as extraordinary, and I wouldn't trade it for anything. I don't even wish now that I had more money. And had I been asked if I was suffering at the time, I would have said a defiant no."


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


"In this early memory he looks different from the way I would remember him later."


"But that's why you're upset now. Fiction is not life.''You don't believe that.''I think I do.''You know as well as I do that the line can't be drawn, that we're infected at every moment by fictions of all kinds, that it's inescapable.''Don't be a sophist,' he said. 'There is a world and it's palpable.''I don't mean that,' I said. 'I mean that it's hard really to see it, that it's all hazy with out dreams and fantasies."


"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."


"It encapsulates so neatly the lesson of expectation and reality that it could serve as a parable. The fact that tomatoes are good is beside the point. If you think you're getting an apple, a tomato will revolt you. That New York should be nicknamed the Big Apple, that an apple is the fruit of humankind's first error and the expulsion from paradise, that America and paradise have been linked and confused ever since Europeans first hit its shores, makes the story reverberate as myth."


"Dreams are stories made by and for the dreamer, and each dreamer has his own folds to open and knots to untie."


"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."
bottom of page