Siri Hustvedt Quotes

A man is free to go up as high as he can reach up to; but I, with all my style and pep, can't get a man my equal because a girl is always judged by her mother.

We Latin women are liberated from the neck up, not the neck down.

I felt trapped and fabricated in the fifties living up to other people's expectations.

In countries like ours, women enter politics in mourning clothes.

People in America, of course, live in all sorts of fashions, because they are foreigners, or unlucky, or depraved, or without ambition; people live like that, but Americans live in white detached houses with green shutters. Rigidly, blindly, the dream takes precedence.

My father's generation of Saudi men are more liberal than the men of my generation. But with women, it's the opposite.

I think in the United States we have a different standard for what equality means for women that isn't really that comparable to that in the Middle East.

A lot of times, in our culture and our society, we put romantic love somehow on a higher plane than self-love and friendship love. You can't do that. You have to honor and really fully invest in all these different loving relationships.

I think the black community has a lot to work on internally with what they deem successful.

Owing to cultural beliefs, girls have been taught to be small, disappear and not take our full place in society. But that is not what we are meant to be.

When men are oppressed, it's a tragedy. When women are oppressed, it's tradition.

Japanese women live in fear of making the least sound in a bathroom stall. Japanese men pay no attention to the subject whatsoever.

I have often wondered that learning is not thought a proper ingredient in the education of a woman of quality or fortune. Since they have the same improvable minds as the male part of their species.

Boys are sent out into the world to buffet with its temptations, to mingle with bad and good, to govern and direct - girls are to dwell in quiet homes among few friends, to exercise a noiseless influence.

It's important to control yourself because life gets too complicated if you don't, but the impulse is often there for people. Some say society should be more open. That doesn't work either.

We still have gaps that are rooted in gender inequality. Certainly we have discrimination against the LGBT community.

The systems of stereotypes may be the core of our personal tradition, the defenses of our position in society. They are an ordered more or less consistent picture of the world, to which our habits, our tastes, our capacities, our comforts and our hopes have adjusted themselves. They may not be a complete picture of the world, but they are a picture of a possible world to which we are adapted. In that world, people and things have their well-known places, and do certain expected things. We feel at home there. We fit in. We are members.

We live in a world where everybody's supposed to be cool and act tough and put up fronts, and everybody is so cynical.

To live in a culture in which women are routinely naked where men aren't is to learn inequality in little ways all day long.

All well bred persons lie - Besides, you are a woman; you must never speak what you think.

I can't count the times that upon telling someone I am vegetarian, he or she responded by pointing out an inconsistency in my lifestyle or trying to find a flaw in an argument I never made. (I have often felt that my vegetarianism matters more to such people than it does to me.)

There are far too many men in politics and not enough elsewhere.

Men make the moral code and they expect women to accept it.

Women have choices, and men have responsibilities.

Certainly in each social period, youth must be made to venerate the dominant absurdities.