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"Only the unprotected self can feel joy."
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"I'll tell them that on bad mornings, it feels impossible to take pleasure in anything because I'm afraid it could be taken away."

"I fear I have praised you too much too soon. Will I lose you in your shame of believing that you can never be what I think you are?"

"Turns out rolling your eyes in a bar when 'Land Down Under' plays is like someone belching during the Star Spangled Banner in America."

"As a young girl, I allowed my self-esteem to be determined by others' opinions, and I devoted incredible energy tuning into how everyone else felt."

"To live is to have worries and uncertainties. Keep them inside, and they will destroy you for certain--leaving behind a person so callused that emotion can find no root in his heart."

"Some women feel the need to act like they're never scared, needy or hurt; like they're as hardened as a man. I think that's dishonest. It's ok to feel delicate sometimes. Real beauty is in the fragility of your petals. A rose that never wilts isn't a rose at all."

"Don't touch me, I'll die if you touch me."

"It's very true; there are many more iron pots certainly than porcelain. But you may depend on it that every one bears some mark; even the hardest iron pots have a little bruise, a little hole somewhere. I flatter myself that I'm rather stout, but if I must tell you the truth I've beenshockingly chipped and cracked. I do very well for service yet, because I've been cleverly mended; and I try to remain in the cupboard-the quiet, dusky cupboard where there's an odour of stale spices-as much as I can. Butwhen I've to come out and into a strong light-then, my dear, I'm a horror!"

"In our age it is not sex that raises its ugly head, but love."

"A little smoke lost in the air, that was the life of a man."
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."


"I am fascinated that no one I have read seems to have noticed that the literature on Picasso continually turns grown-up women into girls."


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


"In order to be accepted, women must compensate for their ambition and strength by being nice. Men don't have to be nearly as much d as women. I do not believe women are natively nicer than men. They may learn that niceness brings rewards and hat names ambition is often punished. They may ingratiate themselves because such behavior is rewarded and a strategy of stealth may lead to better results than being forthright, but even when women are open and direct, they are not always seen or heard."


"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."


"When a culture oppresses women, and all do to one degree or another, it isn't convenient to acknowledge that there are women who like submission in bed or who have fantasies about rape. Masochistic fantasies damage the case for equality, and even when they are seen as the result of a "sick society," the peculiarity of our sexual actions or fantasies is not easily untangled or explained away. The ground from which they spring is simply too muddy. Acts can be controlled, but not desire. Sexual feeling pops up, in spite of our politics."
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