The Summer Without Men
Siri Hustvedt
Top 10 Best Quotes
“There is no future without a past, because what is to be cannot be imagined except as a form of repetition.”
“I will turn human anatomy into roses and stars and sea. I will dissect the beloveds body in metaphor.”
“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.”
“Reading is a private pursuit; one that takes place behind closed doors.”
“Some of us are fated to live in a box from which there is only temporary release. We of the damned-up spirits, of the thwarted feelings, of the blocked hearts, and the pent-up thoughts, we who long to blast out, flood forth in a torrent of rage or joy or even madness, but there is nowhere for us to go, nowhere in the world because no one will have us as we are, and there is nothing to do except to embrace the secret pleasures of our sublimations, the arc of a sentence, the kiss of a rhyme, the image that forms on paper or canvas, the inner cantata, the cloistered embroidery, the dark and dreaming needlepoint from hell or heaven or purgatory or none of those three, but there must be some sound and fury from us, some clashing cymbals in the void.”
“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.”
“There are tragedies and there are comedies, aren’t there? And they are often more the same than different, rather like men and women, if you ask me. A comedy depends on stopping the story at exactly the right moment.”
“We must all allow ourselves the fantasy of projection from time to time, a chance to clothe ourselves in the imaginary gowns and tails of what has never been and never will be. This gives some polish to our tarnished lives, and sometimes we may choose one dream over another, and in the choosing find some respite from ordinary sadness. After all, we, none of us, can ever untangle the knot of fictions that make up that wobbly thing we call a self.”
“We are all dying one by one. We all smell of mortality, and we can't wash it off.”
“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.”
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Book Keywords:
reading, death, words, reading-fiction, self, fantasy, death-and-dying, metaphor, gender-stereotypes, freedom, past, introversion, books, stereotypes, fiction, reading-secrets, isolation, book-lovers, men-and-women, privacy, poetry, literature, anatomy, outsider, love, men, reflection, philosophy, dreams, expression
