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A Plea for Eros: Essays QUOTES

A Plea for Eros: Essays QUOTES

1 " I was happy without having sought happiness. "

― Siri Hustvedt , A Plea for Eros: Essays

2 " I had no friends. Was I happy? I was wildly happy. Sitting on my bed, which took up most of the space in that narrow room, I whispered prayers of thanks that I was really and truly here in New York, beginning another life. I worshipped the place. I feasted on every beautiful inch of it - the crowds, the fruit and vegetable stands, the miles of pavement, the graffiti, even the garbage. All of it sent me into paroxysms of joy. Needless to say, my elevation had an irrational cast to it. Had I not arrived laden with ideas of urban paradise, I might have felt bad losing sleep, might have felt lonely and disoriented, but instead I walked around town like a love-struck idiot, inhaling the difference between there and here. "

― Siri Hustvedt , A Plea for Eros: Essays

3 " It is true that I suffered in a difficult and stupid love affair and that I worked at one bad job after another to try to keep myself going. Nevertheless, I remember that time as extraordinary, and I wouldn't trade it for anything. I don't even wish now that I had more money. And had I been asked if I was suffering at the time, I would have said a defiant no. "

― Siri Hustvedt , A Plea for Eros: Essays

4 " Walking across campus made me feel sad, and I thought to myself, I wasn't happy there. Then, after reading, we walked past Butler Library. It was dark, but the light inside illuminated the windows. Students were reading and working, and those lit windows gave me a wonderful, weightless feeling. I understood for the first time how happy I had been there - in the library. "

― Siri Hustvedt , A Plea for Eros: Essays

5 " Every reader writes the book he or she reads, supplying what isn't there, and that creative invention becomes the book. "

― Siri Hustvedt , A Plea for Eros: Essays

6 " Are not dreams as much a part of living as waking life is? "

― Siri Hustvedt , A Plea for Eros: Essays

7 " fiction is necessary to life - not only as books but as dreams, dreams that frame the world and give it meaning. "

― Siri Hustvedt , A Plea for Eros: Essays

8 " I see what I did not see. I experience that which is outside my own experience. This is the magic of reading novels. This is the working out of the problem of illusion. I take a book off the shelf. I open it up and begin to read, and what I discover in its pages is real. "

― Siri Hustvedt , A Plea for Eros: Essays

9 " We drank coffee. We talked. She loved Charles Dickens, whom she read in Norwegian. Years after she was dead, I wrote a dissertation on Dickens, and though my study of the great man would no doubt have alarmed her, I had a funny feeling that by taking on the English novelist I was returning to my Norwegian roots. "

― Siri Hustvedt , A Plea for Eros: Essays

10 " Maybe the world isn't enough, or maybe the distinction between the world and fiction is not so clear. Fiction is made from the stuff of the world, after all, which includes dreams and wishes and fantasies and memory. And it is never really made alone, but from the material between and among us: language. "

― Siri Hustvedt , A Plea for Eros: Essays

11 " The tangible and intangible collide to cast a spell. But can a person or thing ever be stripped naked? Can we ever discover reality hiding under the meanings we give to people and things? I don't think so. And I don't think Fitzgerald thought so either. His book meditates on the necessity of fiction, not only as lies but as truths. "

― Siri Hustvedt , A Plea for Eros: Essays

12 " The advice is a call to empathy, the ultimate act of the imagination, and the true ground of all fiction. "

― Siri Hustvedt , A Plea for Eros: Essays

13 " The very idea of a library for me is bound to my mother and father and includes the history of my own metamorphosis through books, fictions that are no less part of me than much of my own history. "

― Siri Hustvedt , A Plea for Eros: Essays

14 " Feminism was good for me, as were any number of causes, but as I developed as a thinking person, the truisms and dogmas of every ideology became as worn as that book's cover. "

― Siri Hustvedt , A Plea for Eros: Essays

15 " I read the stories I've been told in my own way and make a narrative of them. Narrative is a chain of links, and I link furiously, merrily hurdling over holes, gaps, and secrets. Nevertheless, I try to remind myself that the holes are there. They are always there, not only in the lives of others but in my own life as well. "

― Siri Hustvedt , A Plea for Eros: Essays

16 " Immigration inevitably involves error and revision. What I imagined it would be, it's not. For better or worse, some mistake is unavoidable. "

― Siri Hustvedt , A Plea for Eros: Essays

17 " No doubt I would have felt reverent in less lovely places, because I imagined a past I connected to myself. "

― Siri Hustvedt , A Plea for Eros: Essays

18 " What she remembered is undoubtedly something so radically different from the image I gave to her memory that the two may be incompatible. "

― Siri Hustvedt , A Plea for Eros: Essays

19 " My memory of the school building itself, its rooms and lockers, blackboards, and hallways, bring on a heavy, oppressive feeling. Whether I was more unhappy in school than any of my friends I don't know. I never would have said I didn't like school, and there are moments I distinctly remember enjoying, but these truths don't alter my memory of that place. "

― Siri Hustvedt , A Plea for Eros: Essays

20 " It can only be that places left behind often become emotionally simplified - that they sound a single note of pain or pleasure, which means that they are never what they were. "

― Siri Hustvedt , A Plea for Eros: Essays