top of page

"Insanity is a state of profound self-absorption."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Psychology quotes

"Instead of breaking or cherry-picking the rules, many just follow the inner rules, which have been instilled during their lifetime and have subtly permeated their thinking. They value rules, as it offers the ravishment of a securing, ceremonial rhythm in life and it prevents them from breaking free from their cocoon, all the more because freedom can be so scaring and exhausting. ['When forgetting the rules of the game']"

"Even if we have bad feelings about our past and it causes a sense of alienation, it belongs to our history. Its benchmarks are stored in the granary of our mind and crucial evaluations for the future cannot be made without consulting the archive of our memory. ['Not without the past']"

"It has been said of dreams that they are a 'controlled psychosis,' or, put another way, a psychosis is a dream breaking through during waking hours."

"Neurotics complain of their illness, but they make the most of it, and when it comes to talking it away from them they will defend it like a lioness her young."

"Words don't have the power to hurt you, unless that person meant more to you than you are willing to confess."

"People just can't cope with happiness."

"At the end of the day, if pride is your greatest strength, turn it into vanity."

"You are not your mind. You don't have to believe the lies it tells you about yourself."

"Because of self-doubt, the fear of failure, or laziness, most people usually bite off way less than they can chew."

"Sniffing glue is a homeless nonbeliever's prayer."
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."


"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."


"True stories can't be told forward, only backward. We invent them from the vantage point of an ever-changing present and tell ourselves how they unfolded."


"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."


"Infancy is irretrievable. Its memories live underground. To what extent they return by stealth or are triggered by various catalysts remains an ongoing question."


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


"It appears that time has turned that young woman, who imagined herself a romantic heroine, into something of a comic character, but I remain fond of her. We are relatives, after all."
bottom of page