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.

— Siri Hustvedt

Accumulated experience always alters perception of the past.

— Siri Hustvedt

Again, I don't fully understand my emotion response to the library or trust it. It was the site of a series of intellectual revelations that were crucial to me, not just as a student but as a human being.

— Siri Hustvedt

All human states are organic brain states - happiness, sadness, fear, lust, dreaming, doing math problems and writing novels - and our brains are not static.

— Siri Hustvedt

Are not dreams as much a part of living as waking life is?

— Siri Hustvedt

Artists are cannibals. We consume other artists, and they become part of us—flesh and bone—only to be spewed out again in our own works.

— Siri Hustvedt

As one of four daughters, I grew up with an imaginary brother - wondering what it would have been like if one of us had been a boy. There's no question that there was a phantom boy child in my imagination when I was young.

— Siri Hustvedt

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.

— Siri Hustvedt

But all attractions are alike,' he said. 'They come from an emptiness inside.' He hammered on this chest with his index finger. 'Something's missing, and you have to fill it. Books, paintings, people, they're all the same...'' A lot of people do without books and paintings.'' True,' he said, 'but that doesn't affect the argument.' Paris turned his head to one side and chewed on his lip. 'Of course, nothing ever does the trick. Nobody's really satisfied for long.

— Siri Hustvedt

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 without dreams and fantasies.

— Siri Hustvedt