Siri Hustvedt Quotes

And the process of reading is such a private one. I once came into a room where a friend of mine was reading one of my books, and he clicked his tongue impatiently and shooed me off.

I read Dad's books like I did before, now things are crystal clear. Lock the door in the bathroom, now I just can't get caught in here.

Blessed books—they’re a place to be alone, and no one else can come in.

I have an intimate relationship with books. After all, I take them with me into the bathtub-not an invitation I offer lightly.

I wished I could be alone in my room, with my books, away from these people.

The privacy of reading frees us to entertain the alien.

I spend a lot of time reading and try to make sure that I can get a little bit of alone time every day.

I learned to build bookshelves and brought books to my room, gathering them around me thickly. I read by day and into the night. I thought about perfectibility, and deism, and adjectives, and clouds, and the foxes, I locked my door, from the inside, and leaped from the roof and went to the woods, by day or darkness.

I’m the kind of person who likes to be by himself. To put a finer point on it, I’m the type of person who doesn’t find it painful to be alone. I find spending an hour or two every day running alone, not speaking to anyone, as well as four or five hours alone at my desk, to be neither difficult nor boring. I’ve had this tendency ever since I was young, when, given a choice, I much preferred reading books on my own or concentrating on listening to music over being with someone else. I could always think of things to do by myself.

Read day and night, devour books - these sleeping pills - not to know but to forget! Through books you can retrace your way back to the origins of spleen, discarding history and its illusions.

We keep quiet about what we read. Our enjoyment of a book remains a jealously guarded secret. Perhaps because there's no need to talk, or because it takes time to distill what we've read before we can say anything. Silence is our guarantee of intimacy. We might have finished reading but we're still living the book.

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

It has always pleased me to read while eating if I have no companion; it gives me the society I lack. I devour alternately a page and a mouthful; it is as though my book were dining with me.

From an early age she had developed the art of being alone and generally preferred her own company to anyone else’s. She read books at enormous speed and judged them entirely on her ability to remove her from her material surroundings. In almost all the unhappiest days of her life she had been able to escape from her own inner world by living temporarily in someone else’s, and on the two or three occasions that she had been too upset to concentrate she had been desolate.

In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody.

One of the things I enjoy most is to be left alone with a book.

I read a lot of books. So, usually when I go home I try to re-charge my batteries and absorb new stories to become inspired again.

All my good reading, you might say, was done in the toilet.

I tended to be a solitary young girl, and I still am. I would like to find a quiet corner and color in my coloring book. When I think back, I made that corner mine, not really caring about the rest of the house.

I had to share a room with my sister, who is five and a half years older than I am. We didn't get along well, and I felt that I had no privacy. So books were my privacy, because no one could join me in a book, no one could comment on the action or make fun of it. I used to spend hours reading in the bathroom -- and we only had one bathroom in our small apartment!

As a kid, I was a big reader. Books and theater were the way I understood the world, and also the way I organized my sense of morality, of how to live a good life. I would read all night. My mom would come into my room and tell me I had to go to sleep, so I would hide books under my bed. At first I had a tough time getting through novels, so I read plays, because a play is generally shorter and has all those tools for getting people hooked early on.

Your house, being the place in which you read, can tell us the position books occupy in your life, if they are a defense you set up to keep the outside world at a distance, if they area dream into which you sink as if into a drug, or bridges you cast toward the outside, toward the world that interests you so much that you want to multiply and extend its dimensions through books.

When Mats came in the evenings, they would drink tea in the kitchen while reading their books and talking about them. If Katri came in, they were quiet and waited for her to leave. The back door would close, and Katri would have gone. “Does your sister read our books?” Anna wanted to know. “No. She reads literature.

You're either reading a book or you're not.

That's how it is with books, isn't it: They're not in a hurry. They'll wait for you till you're ready. People empty me. I have to go away to refill.