Siri Hustvedt Quotes

Hysteria is something that I've been interested for a very long time. I thought I might have it, but it seems that it's unlikely.

Most of the depressions are self-created. A few people are pathologically ill: they cannot help it. It just comes from within because of genetic and other factors. But almost everybody else can be driven to madness, because the line between sanity and insanity is quite thin.

We all go a little mad sometimes.

Now is the age of anxiety.

I think everybody's nuts.

We're all controlled neurotics.

Order and disorder, form and formless must have profound psychological roots, nervous roots.

If we weren't all crazy, we'd just go insane.

... madness entered my veins.

The drug habit is the unfailing accompaniment of the neurosis produced by this wonderful age of private-owned machinery. Machinery imposes an exhaustive drain on the nervous system. It compels an acceleration and competition in all departments of life, that is reflected in increased physical breakdown. Drugs then step in as a stimulant.

I am a clinical zombie.

Depression is not a choice.

I told the doctor I was overtired, anxiety-ridden, compulsively active, constantly depressed, with recurring fits of paranoia. Turns out I'm normal.

I only hear my own voice. When you start hearing other voices, then it's time to worry.

The prevalence of suicide, without doubt, is a test of height in civilization; it means that the population is winding up its nervous and intellectual system to the utmost point of tension and that sometimes it snaps.

I'm always shook up and nervous and I've got the hospital record to prove it.

I think my real depressions started when I was about 16 and doing The Patty Duke Show. I would go to bed at about 10 o'clock on a Friday night and not get up again until 6:30 Monday morning.

Any time I got in emotional turmoil, I felt sick all the time, like at any minute I would die.

I have my own demons and dark moods. It's weird.

Sometimes you can know too much. A lot of brainy people like Stephen Fry are quite depressive.

Cutting, and suicide, two very different symptoms of the same problem, are gaining on us. I personally don't know a single person who doesn't know at least two of these victims personally.

I don't know what anxiety is like anymore.

When Mom had her first nervous breakdown, she said she had a vision of Christ coming to her in the living room.

Nothing uniquely bad has happened to me in my personal life, but all the regular little bad things have accumulated to make me a neurotic person. And these adventures are my way of trying to make sense of that.

The only problem with seeing too much is that it makes you insane.