Language Quotes by Siri Hustvedt

People who grow up with two or more languages understand that each can express certain aspects of reality better than the other.

— Siri Hustvedt

I love making up visual works of art in language. I get to be an artist without actually being an artist in…

— Siri Hustvedt

Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.

— Siri Hustvedt

Flashbacks rarely involve language. Mine certainly didn't. They were visual, motor, and sensory, and they took place in a relentless, horrifying present.

— Siri Hustvedt

“but the story's interest lies in my struggle over semantics and the moral resonance of interpreting the meaning of a word.”

— Siri Hustvedt

Every sickness has an alien quality, a feeling of invasion and loss of control that is evident in the language we use…

— Siri Hustvedt

“we can't escape the erotic vocabulary of our culture any more than we can escape language itself.”

— Siri Hustvedt

That is the strangeness of language: it crosses the boundaries of the body, is at once inside and outside, and it sometimes…

— Siri Hustvedt

“Through a story that delineates the power of words to obfuscate, exploit, and distort human reality, Henry James offers his own nuanced,…

— Siri Hustvedt

“Language, after all, is impersonal and personal, particular and general, both inside us and outside us, and James writes with a profound…

— Siri Hustvedt

I remember thinking how easy it is to speak in clichés, to steal a line from pulp fiction and let it fall.…

— Siri Hustvedt

“Mirroring makes speech possible; language relies on the reflective quality of I and you through which verbal interaction becomes possible.”

— Siri Hustvedt