Philosophy Quote by Siri Hustvedt — Inspiring Words on Life, Love & Wisdom

“Not telling is just as interesting as telling I have found. Why speech, that short verbal journey from inside to outside can be excrutiating under certain circumstances is fascinating.”

“We are all dying one by one. We all smell of mortality, and we can't wash it off.”

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

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

“For a game, you don’t need a teacher.”

“In the name of Bacon will you chicken me up that egg.”

“You are what you do. If you do boring, stupid monotonous work, chances are you'll end up boring, stupid and monotonous. Work is a much better explanation for the creeping cretinization all around us than even such significant moronizing mechanisms as television and education.”

“Most of the liberal defenses of pornography are equally muddled. Writers and university professors feel quite heroic in taking the witness stand to avow that some outrageously immoral book is somehow supremely moral. These men usually display two contradictory motives. First, they oppose the censorship of any book on any grounds as a matter of principle. Anything and everything should be freely published. Some would impose restraints on things that are Nazi, racist, or similarly tabooed, but many are earnest champions of unlimited freedom of publication. Unlimited freedom is for them a supreme good. Second, since unlimited freedom is seen as a supreme good, it follows that the results of such an unlimited freedom must somehow be good. They therefore feel it necessary to defend the moral integrity of such books as are attacked for their use of this license. As a result, these scholars and writers place themselves in a most amusing position: they are ready to defend anything attacked on moral grounds, as though freedom makes all its adherents good. No doubt if some avant-garde writer issued a book empty of everything save a cake of cow dung between its covers, scholars would not be lacking to interpret for a court what a profound and redeeming social commentary was at stake.”