Siri Hustvedt, The Blazing World: A Novel (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014) ("For the profile on Rune I needed the facts. They're stickler for fact at The Gothamite. They check and recheck the facts. The joke on all this fastidious fact-checking is that you're allowed to humiliate anybody, as long as the subject's birth date, hometown, and all numbers connected to him are flawless. And you can quote out-and-out liars, as long as you quite them correctly. It gives roundness to a piece: a bit of positive, a bit of negative. We like balanced reporting. But balance is most important in things serious. Politics is serious. Muckraking is serious, and it must have prose to match. War zones require that all humor and/or irony cease and desist. The arts are not serious, not in the U.S. of A. They do not involve life and death. We are not French. In reviews of the arts, if you spell the guy's name right, you can write whatever you want. You can send hate mail to whichever pompous ass you choose in the form of a review and make a reputation for yourself in the bargain. Do I offend? Excuse-moi." Id. at 171-172.).
Siri Hustvedt, The Blindfold: A Novel (New York: Poseidon, 1992) ("Distortion is part of desire. We always change the things we want." Id. at 147.).
Siri Hustvedt, The Enchantment of Lily Dahl: A Novel (New York: Henry Holt, 1996).
Siri Hustvedt, Living, Thinking, Looking: Essays (New York: Picador/Henry Holt, 2012) (From "My Father/Myself: "What did I want? More. Reading is internal action. It is the intimate ground where, as my husband says, 'two consciousnesses touch.' I would add two unconsciousnesses as well. Reading in our culture has become so attenuated that all reading is now considered 'good.' Children are admonished to read in general, as if all books are equal, but a brain bloated with truisms and cliches, with formulaic stories and simple answers to badly asked questions is hardly what we should aspire to. For the strange thing is that even books we can no longer actively recall are part of us, and like a lost melody, they may return suddenly." Id. at 65, 83. From Old Pictures": "There is Little doubt that late capitalism relies heavily on an endless parade of images, which, while seductive, are essentially empty and intended to make sure that people consume more and more products. Indeed, Madison Avenue's job is to create needs we didn't know we had. Celebrity means turning a human being into a vacant commodity that can be bought and sold literally as image only, and it can proliferate--be everywhere at once--on the Internet. Reality TV is an oxymoron. Wars are sold (and unsold) to the public through the camera lens. A short lost will suffice: Vietnam, the Gulf War, the invasion of Iraq, Abu Ghraib." Id. at 253, 261. From "Margaret Bowland's Theatrum Mundi": "My question is: What is the imagination if it is not becoming the other?" Id. at 307, 312.).
Siri Hustvedt, Mysteries of the Rectangle: Essays on Painting (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2005) (from "Giorgio Morandi: Not Just Bottles": "The legacy of Christian thought is far-reaching. Among the deep marks it has left on the Western soul is a feeling many people have that what we see is not everything, that there is something more lurking behind the merely physical--a spiritual dimension to life. But the thought may be turned around as well: whatever one may believe about spirituality, it seems undeniably true that the idea of an object creates its reality to a large extent. The physical world is mysterious, and the longer and harder you look at it, the stranger it becomes." Id. at 121, 132.).
Siri Hustvedt, A Plea for Eros: Essays ( New York; Picador/Henry Holt, 2006) (From "9/11, or One Year Later": "Both in the United States and around the world, 9/11 has become a media euphemism batted around in political debates from both the right and the left with a glibness and ease that's rather frightening. But it seems to me that like other crimes committed against human beings around the world in the name of varying ideologies and religions, the attacks on the World Trade Center can only be understood through individual people, because if we lose sight of the particular--of one man's or one woman's or one child;s suffering and loss--we risk losing sight of our common humanity, and that is a form of blindness, not only to others but to ourselves." Id. at 119, 130.).
Siri Hustvedt, The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves (New York: Henry Holt, 2010) ("When I read a novel, I see it, and later, I remember the images I invented for the book. Some of those images are borrowed from intimate laces in my own life. Others,I suspect, are taken form movies or pictures in books or paintings I've seen, I need to put the characters somewhere." Id, at 111. "In Buddhism, the self is an illusion. There is no self." Id. at 192. There are only the stories 'one' tells 'oneself.' Enlightenment comes when one stops telling oneself stories and just be.).
Siri Hustvedt, The Sorrows of an American: A Novel (New York: Henry Holt, 2008) ("[W]e all go to pieces . . . a one time or another. . . . Your grief makes you more fragile. You know I've always thought of wholeness and integration as necessary myths. We're fragmented beings who cement ourselves together, but there are always cracks. Living with the cracks is part of being, well, reasonably healthy." Id. at 139. "'Our own father used to talk about city slickers,' I said, smiling at my sister. 'But every perceived difference, no matter how slight, can become an argument for Otherness--money, education skin color, religion, political party, hairstyle, anything. Enemies are enlivening. Evil-doers, jihadists, barbarians. Hatred is exciting and contagious and conveniently eliminates all ambiguity. You just spew your own garbage onto someone else.'" Id. at 194.).
Siri Hustvedt, The Summer Without Men: A Novel (New York: Picador/Henry Holt, 2011) ("Within minutes, the book club was over. And it had ended before I could say that there is no human subject outside the purview of literature. No immersion in the history of philosophy is needed for me to insist that there are NO RULES in art, and there is no ground under the feet of the Nitwits and Buffoons who think that there are rules and laws and forbidden territories, and no reason for a hierarchy that declares 'broad' superior to 'narrow' or 'masculine' more desirable than 'feminine.' Except by prejudice there is no sentiment in the arts banned from expression and no story that cannot be told. The enchantment is in the feeling and in the telling, and that is all." Id. at 153.).
Siri Hustvedt, What I Loved: A Novel (New York: Henry Holt, 2003) ("I've always thought that love thrives on a certain kind of distance, that it requires an awed separateness to continue. Without that necessary remove, the physical minutiae of the other person grows ugly in its magnification." Id. at 43. "But nagging is a strategy of the powerless, and there is nothing mysterious about it." Id. at 61.).
