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"Within weeks of my arrival in New York, I was someone else, not because there had been a revolution in my psychological makeup or any trauma. It was simply this: people saw me in a light in which I had never been seen before."
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"Either way, you were connected. By your desires. By your defiance. By the simple, complicated fact of who you were."

"Dreaming and loving and screwing. None of these are identities. Maybe when other people look at us, but not to ourselves. We are so much more complicated than that."

"She looks like a very young old person, or a very old young person; but then, she's looked that way ever since she was two."

"But then it came to me that who I really am is a person who doesn't need to know who he really is, in the usual sense. What does it mean, anyway - family background and so forth? People use it mostly as an excuse for their own snobbery, or else their failings. I'm free of the temptation, that's all. I'm free of the strings. Nothing ties me down."

"If you're born a man, be a man. If a woman, be proud of being one. For, you're not the body, mind, this or that. "Ye are gods!" - human."
Explore more quotes by Siri Hustvedt


"There is no reason we should expect young children to enter the nocturnal darkness of sleep and dreams without help."


"I know, but he must have felt it that way, that evil was an emptiness, a lack of something, not a presence.'He turned his head fast and looked at me. 'That's what desire is, isn't it? The lack of something."


"The truth is that personality inevitably bleeds into all forms of our intellectual life. We all extrapolate from our own lives in order to understand the world."


"Transformation of the self are related to where you are, and identity Is dependent on others."


"Because I knew so much about him, because I had been close to him, I couldn't bring the various fragments of my experience with him into a single coherent image. The truth was mobile and contradictory, and I was willing to live with that."


"That night as I lay in bed, I thought of several things I could have said and mourned the fact that my wit usually bloomed late, peaking when it no longer mattered, during the solitary hours close to midnight."


"Dreaming is another form of thinking, more concrete, more economical, more visual, and often more emotional than the thoughts of the day, but a thinking through of the day, nevertheless."
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