Siri Quotes

None of us is immune to suggestion. We are social beings and live in a social world. ~ Siri Hustvedt

What makes Siri cool is she has a personality. ~ Tim Cook

I continue to write essays about art. The visual is always part of my work, and it gives me immense pleasure to make up the words of art and create them verbally rather than build them. ~ Siri Hustvedt

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. ~ Siri Hustvedt

nonsense can also be real ~ Siri Hustvedt

I found myself fascinated by neuroscience, attended a monthly lecture on brain science at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, and was invited to become a member of a discussion group devoted to a new field: neuropsychoanalysis. ~ Siri Hustvedt

If she raised you, she's your mother," Siri said. "It doesn't matter who gave birth to you." He ~ Brandon Sanderson

I had no destination, just the will to go, and I went fast. ~ Siri Hustvedt

Ture 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. ~ Siri Hustvedt

So, you tracked me down, did you?"

"I did." Hayes's gravelly voice filled the phone.

"Very resourceful."

"I have an assistant..."

"Of yourse you do."

"Her name is Siri. She's quite good at her job. ~ Robinne Lee

Love is not some tool for manipulation. Love is a gift - love is from God. Love means everything. ~ Siri Mitchell

Do you know that I can't remember her face? Try as I may, it will not be conjured. I can tell you what she looked like; I can recite a description of her features, part by part, but I cannot evoke the whole face.'
'Don't you have a photograph?'
'Photographs!' He spat out the word. 'I'm talking about true recollection - seeing the face. ~ Siri Hustvedt

I suppose we are all products of our parents' joy and suffering. Their emotions are written into us, as much as the inscriptions made by their genes. ~ Siri Hustvedt

She sat in silence on a chair looking over him, content with the fullness of her own thoughts. ~ Siri Hustvedt

Flashbacks rarely involve language. Mine certainly didn't. They were visual, motor, and sensory, and they took place in a relentless, horrifying present. ~ Siri Hustvedt

All I can say is that every time I'm with him, she's there. She walks through every game I play with him. She whispers behind me every time I talk to him. When we draw, she's there. When we build blocks, she's there. When I scold him, she's there. Whenever I look up, she's there. ~ Siri Hustvedt

Some of us are fated to live in a box from which there is only temporary release. We of the damned-up spirits, of the thwarted feelings, of the blocked hearts, and the pent-up thoughts, we who long to blast out, flood forth in a torrent of rage or joy or even madness, but there is nowhere for us to go, nowhere in the world because no one will have us as we are, and there is nothing to do except to embrace the secret pleasures of our sublimations, the arc of a sentence, the kiss of a rhyme, the image that forms on paper or canvas, the inner cantata, the cloistered embroidery, the dark and dreaming needlepoint from hell or heaven or purgatory or none of those three, but there must be some sound and fury from us, some clashing cymbals in the void. ~ Siri Hustvedt

Reading is a private pursuit; one that takes place behind closed doors. ~ Siri Hustvedt

Creativity has always depended on openness and flexibility, so let us hope for more of both in the future. ~ Siri Hustvedt

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 ~ Siri Hustvedt

The concept of the Trinity seems very esoteric and irrelevant in today's world, but it seems to me that only a faith embracing each person of the Trinity can save us from imbalance. While love without faith offers no hope, faith without love offers no mercy. We must have both faith and love or run the danger of discovering that, in the end, we have nothing at all. ~ Siri Mitchell

People imagine that hope has degrees, but I think not. There is hope and there is no hope. ~ Siri Hustvedt

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

The computer model will be replaced by an organic model, in which the brain-mind is embodied - part of a whole, dynamic, living organism: one driven by emotional forces, not only cognitive ones. ~ Siri Hustvedt

Thank Siri when she helps, it's only polite! ~ Dutch Jones

Very simply, for the mind, absence can be a catalyst for presence. ~ Siri Hustvedt

I liked the streets as much as museums, and I spent hours in the city wandering around, inhaling the garbage. ~ Siri Hustvedt

We chart delusions through collective agreement. ~ Siri Hustvedt

Accumulated experience always alters perception of the past. ~ Siri Hustvedt

We read each other through our eyes, and anatomically they are an extension of our brains. When we catch someone's eye, we look into a mind. ~ Siri Hustvedt

Later, when the battles are won and the world is theirs, I will tell them about her. I will sing to them of Siri. ~ Dan Simmons

I do understand! I understand what they do not, and that is you can only do with what you have. What God has given you. If you try to be anyone else, it is the worst thing that can happen because you cannot ever be them - and then you give up being you ~ Siri Mitchell

Forgetting," I said, "is probably as much a part of life as remembering. We're all amnesiacs. ~ Siri Hustvedt

I'd been writing poems for many years, but most of them I didn't like. Then, when I was 23, I wrote one I did like, sent it to 'The Paris Review' - the highest publication I could think of - and they accepted it. No other moment in my literary life has quite come close to that. ~ Siri Hustvedt

It's a language I've come to hate, because it admits no mystery and no ambiguity into its smug vocabulary, which arrogantly suggests that everything can be known. ~ Siri Hustvedt

I curtsied. 'Thank you, Mr. Stansbury. And I apologize for my lack of grace.'
He bowed. 'Never apologize for being courageous, Miss Withersby. ~ Siri Mitchell

I am convinced that during bouts of insomnia, I have sometimes slept without knowing it. ~ Siri Hustvedt

When dailiness enters memory, repetition fixes places in the mind, but it also burdens them with a wealth of experience that is often difficult to untangle. ~ Siri Hustvedt

It is not that there is no difference between men and women; it is how much difference that difference makes, and how we choose to frame it. ~ Siri Hustvedt

His was an illness that besets the intellectual: the indefatigable will to mastery. Chronic and incurable, it afflicts those who lust after a world that makes sense. ~ Siri Hustvedt

I remembered that time of life when most of what matters can be summed up by the phase 'the other kids,' and it struck me as pitiful. The dread was more complex ... Dread is a lure, and I cold feel its tug, but why? ... Perception is never passive. We are not only receivers of the world; we also actively produce it. There is a hallucinatory quality to all perception, and illusions are easy to create. [pp. 656-66] ~ Siri Hustvedt

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. ~ Siri Hustvedt

Old man," she said. "Don't you want to prepare or something?"
"Prepare what?"
"Yourself. For death."
Siri laughed.
"Well, Bpoo. Let's see. If the Buddhists are right, I'm just on my way to the next incarnation. Unless there's a manual for how to behave correctly as a gnat I'm not sure how I'd prepare for that. If the Catholics are right, nothing short of an asbestos suit and a glass of iced water will help where I'm going. And if the communists are right, you do your best and when you're gone they put up a statue in your honor and the locals dry their laundry on it. So, if I'm going, you're the heir to today's legacy. ~ Colin Cotterill

I said very little. I knew that for the time being I was the open air, the place to put the words, not a real interlocutor. And then, ekthout a transition of any kind, she began to tell me .... {p. 134} ~ Siri Hustvedt

A sense that even if every scrap of a life were saved, thrown into a giant mound and then carefully sifted to extract all possible meaning, it would not add up to a life. ~ Siri Hustvedt

In August of 2002, I survived a car accident. Although I can still see the van speeding toward us, I cannot bring to mind the crash itself - only its aftermath. ~ Siri Hustvedt

There's a phenomenology of being sick, one that depends on temperament, personal history, and the culture which we live in. ~ Siri Hustvedt

But if it wasn't you, then who would I dream about? ~ Siri Mitchell

did you realize every time you speak a query into Apple's Siri artificial intelligence agent, your voice recording is analyzed and stored by the company for at least two years? ~ Marc Goodman

There comes a time when even the thing you love betrays you ... you have to know when it's time to give it up, I suppose. Doesn't mean you love it any less, of course. Just means it's time to move on. When you can't agree with the decisions that bind you, then you have to take your talents elsewhere. ~ Siri Mitchell

Gratitude" is about letting go of desired outcomes and fully embracing the privilege and process of pursuing goals and dreams. "Believe" refers to the confidence that arises naturally through this process, a self-trust that is the antithesis of the doubt-fueled fixation on goals and dreams expressed in Siri's nightly fantasy of having the perfect race at the 2000 Olympics. Siri ~ Fitzgerald Matt

Drowning, she clung fiercely to that small, splintered piece of mast bobbing in the ocean we call justice. There is no justice, of course, or very little of it, and counting on it as a life raft is a big mistake. ~ Siri Hustvedt

Sometimes even now I think I see him in the street or standing in a window or bent over a book in a coffee shop. And in that instant, before I understand that it's someone else, my lungs tighten and I lose my breath. ~ Siri Hustvedt

As I finished my rice, I sketched out the plot of a pornographic adventure film called The Massage Room. Sirien, a young girl from northern Thailand, falls hopelessly in love with Bob, an American student who winds up in the massage parlor by accident, dragged there by his buddies after a fatefully boozy evening. Bob doesn't touch her, he's happy just to look at her with his lovely, pale-blue eyes and tell her about his hometown - in North Carolina, or somewhere like that. They see each other several more times, whenever Sirien isn't working, but, sadly, Bob must leave to finish his senior year at Yale. Ellipsis. Sirien waits expectantly while continuing to satisfy the needs of her numerous clients. Though pure at heart, she fervently jerks off and sucks paunchy, mustached Frenchmen (supporting role for Gerard Jugnot), corpulent, bald Germans (supporting role for some German actor). Finally, Bob returns and tries to free her from her hell - but the Chinese mafia doesn't see things in quite the same light. Bob persuades the American ambassador and the president of some humanitarian organization opposed to the exploitation of young girls to intervene (supporting role for Jane Fonda). What with the Chinese mafia (hint at the Triads) and the collusion of Thai generals (political angle, appeal to democratic values), there would be a lot of fight scenes and chase sequences through the streets of Bangkok. At the end of the day, Bob carries her off. But in the penultimate scene, Siri ~ Michel Houellebecq

Walking across campus made me feel sad, and I thought to myself, I wasn't happy there. Then, after reading, we walked past Butler Library. It was dark, but the light inside illuminated the windows. Students were reading and working, and those lit windows gave me a wonderful, weightless feeling. I understood for the first time how happy I had been there - in the library. ~ Siri Hustvedt

It was babies I loved looking at, the little Lords, sensuous delights of pudgy flesh and fluids. For at least three years I was awash in milk and poop and piss and spit-up and sweat and tears. It was paradise. It was exhausting. It was boring. It was sweet, exciting, and sometimes, curiously, very lonely. ~ Siri Hustvedt

Like most people confined to an institution, she had been divested of a past life. ~ Siri Hustvedt

We are all dying one by one. We all smell of mortality, and we can't wash it off. ~ Siri Hustvedt

Tolerating cracks is part of being alive. ~ Siri Hustvedt

I didn't know exactly what to say. "Rush" is a word that pretty much covered every initial sexual encounter I had ever had in my life. and the fact that these two young people felt it necessary to deliberate over sex made me feel a little sad. I have known women who withdrew from me at the last moment and women who regretted their passion the next morning, but a precoital committee meeting had never been a part of my experience. ~ Siri Hustvedt

About Siri . . . Snuffles?" said Harry. "No . . . not exactly . . ." said Hermione slowly. "More . . . wondering . . . I suppose we're doing the right thing . . . I think . . . aren't we?" Harry and Ron looked at each other. ~ J.K. Rowling

This small encounter had a disproportionately large effect on me. I saw myself in relief, separate and distinct from the others in the class, and even though he didn't speak to me in that way for a long time, I began to regard Professor Rose as a secret ally. This transformation took place gradually, and I can't say whether it existed solely in my mind or whether he was responsible for it. I know that I started to look forward to seeing him on Tuesdays, that his face was pleasing, his severity undercut by humor, and that I read the assigned books with new zeal. ~ Siri Hustvedt

I was happy without having sought happiness. ~ Siri Hustvedt

I'm telling you there are many ways to live and many ways to love. I guess my way is more roundabout than most. ~ Siri Hustvedt

Perception plays a vital role in the diagnosis of bipolar illness. Symptoms are perceived through the categories of psychiatric medicine at a given moment in history, categories which are continually shifting and being named or renamed. ~ Siri Hustvedt

The genius of women has always been easy to discount, suppress, or attribute to the nearest man. When ~ Siri Hustvedt

Strindberg came to the rescue. Why, he had asked her, did every woman he ever met have to bring her bloody mother into the bed, every bloody woman, including his own wife, Siri. "You have a wife," she had said. ~ Edna O'Brien

The stories and pictures I make for the lives of the people closest to me are the forms of my empathy. ~ Siri Hustvedt

It's almost too perfect - the poster girl for an illness in the early days of photography sees the world in black and white. ~ Siri Hustvedt

The logic: Reading is a private pursuit, one that often takes place behind closed doors. A young lady might retreat with a book, might even take it into her boudoir, and there, reclining on here silken sheets, imbibing the thrills and chills manufactured by writerly quills, one of her hands, one not absolutely needed to grip the little volume, might wander. The fear, in short, as one-handed reading. [p. 146] ~ Siri Hustvedt

Every time I finish a book, I say to an imaginary god that I do not believe in, 'Please let me live to write another one.' ~ Siri Hustvedt

Rage has such focus. It can't go on forever, but it's invigorating. ~ Siri Hustvedt

The faculty of memory cannot be separated from the imagination. They go hand in hand. To one degree or another, we all invent our personal pasts. And for most of us those pasts are built from emotionally colored memories. ~ Siri Hustvedt

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. ~ Siri Hustvedt

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. ~ Siri Hustvedt

The black-and-white figures of the photographs have had to stand in place of my memory and yet I have always felt that their unmarked graves became a part of me. What was unwritten then is inscribed into what I call myself. ~ Siri Hustvedt

We live in a culture that is much happier talking about organic brain disease than about psychic illness because the former suggests that something that is physically wrong in a brain is wholly unrelated to that person's upbringing or experiences in the world, but that is not necessarily true. ~ Siri Hustvedt

We cannot wish our worlds into being. Much depends on chance, on what we can't control, on others. ~ Siri Hustvedt

It can only be that places left behind often become emotionally simplified - that they sound a single note of pain or pleasure, which means that they are never what they were. ~ Siri Hustvedt

Neurobiological research has shown that in people with chronic PTSD, both stress hormone secretion and areas of the brain connected to memory function, such as the hippocampus, appear to be affected, although exactly how and why remains controversial. ~ Siri Hustvedt

Being a mother is complicated because it's not just a paternal culture making demands on you; it's those internal demands and expectations that women have and are self-generated. ~ Siri Hustvedt

Loss.
A known absence.
If you didn't know it,
it would be nothing,
which it is, of course,
a nothing of another kind,
as acutely felt as a blister,
but a tumult, too,
in the region of the heart and lungs,
an emptiness with a name: You ~ Siri Hustvedt

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. ~ Siri Hustvedt

I was 13 when I had my first bout of insomnia. My family was in Reykjavik, Iceland, for the summer, and day never really became night. ~ Siri Hustvedt

In May, she wrote to tell me that she was coming to New york or a week in June. She was going to stay with me, but her letters made it clear that the visit didnt mean a resumption for our old life. As the day approached, my agitation mounted. By the morning of her arrival, it had reached a pitch that felt something like an inner scream.The very thought that I would soon see Erica again didnt excite me as much as wound me. As I wandered around the loft trying to calm myself, I realized that I was holding my chest like a man who had just been stabbed. After sitting down, I tried to untangled that feeling of injury but couldnt do it - not fully. ~ Siri Hustvedt

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. ~ Siri Hustvedt

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. ~ Siri Hustvedt

The transience of human feeling is nothing short of ludicrous. My mercurial fluctuations in the course of a single evening made me feel as if I had a character made pf chewing gum. I had fallen into the ugly depths of self-pity, a terrain just above the even more hideous lowlands of despair. Then, easily distracted twit that I am, I had, soon after, found myself on maternal heights, where I had practically swooned with pleasure as I bobbed and fondled the borrowed homunculus next door. I had eaten well, drunk too much wine, and embraced a young woman I hardly knew. In short, I had thoroughly enjoyed myself and had every intention of doing so again. [p. 59] ~ Siri Hustvedt

I'm fond of that little scene. Whether my memory is completely accurate or not, it has a sharpness that nothing I look at now can possibly have. ~ Siri Hustvedt

I love making up visual works of art in language. I get to be an artist without actually being an artist in that sense. ~ Siri Hustvedt

An infant no more than six weeks old
a person in the still floppy, stunned by visual stimuli, sucking, arm and foot waving, grunting, grimacing phase of life. How I had loved that stage in my own Daisy's path of becoming. [p.46] ~ Siri Hustvedt

I'm not sure that love is an excuse for everything ~ Siri Hustvedt

Why do you always talk like that? With a hand in front of your mouth?" "Because it's too large." And I could not remember to think of peas and prunes and prisms. "Who told you that?" "My aunt." "And what else has she told you?" "That I'm much too tall." "Has she?" "Yes." I said it in a whisper because Harry had come so very close and his lips were hovering just above mine. "I'm afraid that . . . I might just . . . kiss you. If that's all right." "Oh, Harry . . ." What a strange sensation, to feel Harry's lips upon mine. So warm and gentle and giving. Especially when Franklin's had been so hard and urgent and demanding. He broke away with a sigh. Placed a hand to either side of my neck and stared at me for a long moment . . . just stood there looking deeply into my eyes. And then he slid his hands down to my shoulders and clasped me to himself. "It seems just fine to me." The words were whispered into my ear. "What does?" "Your mouth. And you. You're perfect just the way you are. ~ Siri Mitchell

He interrupted me more frequently and summarized my complaints in an increasingly optimistic light. I couldn't see or feel these changes myself, but Dr. Fish was confident, and I half believed him. The truth is that I participated in the deception. I was studying for my oral exams then, and I was desperate for the treatments to work. ~ Siri Hustvedt

Sleep resistance, bouts of insomnia, nightmares, night terrors, crawling into bed with parents in the middle of the night - all these are so common among children, it seems fair to call them 'normal.' ~ Siri Hustvedt

I bought myself a rubber brain, familiarized myself with its many parts, listened intently, and read more. In fact, I read obsessively, as my husband has told me repeatedly. He has even suggested that my rapacious reading resembles an addiction. ~ Siri Hustvedt

the spectator is the true vanishing point ~ Siri Hustvedt

I was walking home from the library on Broadway, and I remember that the street looked different to me, very clear and beautiful, and I felt incredibly happy. I even said to myself, 'I've never been happier than I am now. ~ Siri Hustvedt

The bottle of red brush on a white table gleamed throughout the remaining years of my childhood as the sign of what was possible there. ~ Siri Hustvedt

I loved it so much I was sorry to finish it. I closed the book and shocked myself by thinking, This is better than life. I didn't mean or want to think this, but I'm afraid I did. Certainly this feeling about a book is the one that makes people want to write. I don't know why I feel more alive when I write, but I do. ~ Siri Hustvedt