Siri Hustvedt - The Summer Without Men (2011)

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The fictive is an enormous territory it turns out, its boundaries vague, and there is little certainty about where it begins and ends.

Siri Hustvedt

Widowers marry again because it makes their lives easier. Widows often don't, because it makes their lives harder.

Siri Hustvedt

I will turn human anatomy into roses and stars and sea. I will dissect the beloveds body in metaphor.

Siri Hustvedt

Lots of women read fiction. Most men don't. Women read fiction written by women and by men. Most men don't. If a man opens a novel, he likes to have a masculine name on the cover; it's reassuring somehow. You never know what might happen to that external genitalia if you immerse yourself in imaginary doings concocted by someone with the goods on the inside.

Siri Hustvedt

Time is not outside us, but inside. Only we live with past, present, and future, and the present is too brief to experience anyway; it is retained afterward and then it is either codified or it slips into amnesia.

Siri Hustvedt

Libraries are sexual dream factories. The languor brings it on.

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 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.

Siri Hustvedt

There is no future without a past, because what is to be cannot be imagined except as a form of repetition.

Siri Hustvedt

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

Siri Hustvedt