Siri Hustvedt Quotes

I think people love to attach themselves to the idea of an overnight success. That may be true about me.

Yet the stupid believe they are awake, busily and brightly assuming they understand things, calling this man ruler, that one herdsman – how dense! Confucius and you are both dreaming! And when I say you are dreaming, I am dreaming, too. Words like these will be labeled the Supreme Swindle.

Learning passes for wisdom among those who want both.

I tell myself that I know you, and then when I think about it, I realize that I don't.

Sometimes the way you think about someone isn't the way they actually are.

Many truths which are not believed are called lies,' the Laughing Beast said. 'Mirrors do not themselves lie unless they have been enchanted. Ordinary mirrors merely reflect what is revealed to them. People lie and mirrors reflect people. If your mother feared mirrors in your land, she feared herself.

So the unwanting soul sees what's hidden, and the ever-wanting soul sees only what it wants.

I knew nothing but shadows and I thought them to be real.

I like to hide behind my intellect. But the truth is, unless all of us start getting honest about what the reality is, things aren't going to change. If we all keep pretending that we know stuff and if everyone else would do what we knew and everything would be a better place, then nothing is going to change.

The things that we want we willingly believe, and the things that we think we expect everyone else to think.

Strange to dream in the right shape and build in the wrong shape, but maybe that is what we do every day, never believing that a dream could tell the truth.

Only fools imagine they are already awake. How clearly they understand everything! How easily they distinguish this deception from that reality!

Our minds sometimes see what our hearts wish were true.

It is very often nothing but our own vanity that deceives us. Women fancy admiration means more than it does. And men take care that they should.

It's very hard to look in the mirror. We all know this. It's much easier to have illusions about yourself. And in particular, when you think, well, I'm going to believe what I like, but I'll say what the powerful want, you do that over time, and you believe what you say.

Belief in the lie is the life of the lie.

There is not a single line in this diary that does not call for a correction or a denial...Yes: throughout these pages I meant what I was writing and I meant the opposite; reading them again I feel completely lost...I was lying to myself. How I lied to myself!

Amazing what we can self-rationalize when we really want something

Nobody knows you. You don't know yourself. And I, who am half in love with you, What am I in love with? My own imaginings?

Of course you have to create the conditions of a certain belief. And maybe ignoring something that you don't want to see, at least for the time of the shooting.

The trouble with most of us is that we know too much that ain't so.

I don't want realism. I want magic!

When you want something bad, you'll tell yourself a thousand lies.

Thinking that what you want equals what's best for you is a dead end.

Prejudices subsist in people's imagination long after they have been destroyed by their experience.