Siri Hustvedt Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“Every painting is always two paintings: The one you see, and the one you remember.”
-- Siri HustvedtSource : Siri Hustvedt (2006). “Mysteries of the Rectangle: Essays on Painting”, p.12, Princeton Architectural Press
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“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 HustvedtSource : Siri Hustvedt (2011). “The Summer Without Men”, p.72, Hachette UK
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“That is the strangeness of language: it crosses the boundaries of the body, is at once inside and outside, and it sometimes happens that we don't notice the threshold has been crossed.”
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“There is no future without a past, because what is to be cannot be imagined except as a form of repetition.”
-- Siri HustvedtSource : Siri Hustvedt (2011). “The Summer Without Men: A Novel”, p.94, Macmillan
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“Dreams are stories made by and for the dreamer, and each dreamer has his own folds to open and knots to untie.”
-- Siri HustvedtSource : Siri Hustvedt (2010). “The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves”, p.137, Macmillan
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“I've always thought of wholeness and integration as necessary myths. We're gragmented beings who cement ourselves together, but there are always cracks. Living with the cracks is part of being, well, reasonably healthy.”
-- Siri HustvedtSource : Siri Hustvedt (2008). “The Sorrows of an American: A Novel”, p.139, Macmillan
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“Every sickness has an alien quality, a feeling of invasion and loss of control that is evident in the language we use about it.”
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“Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.”
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“The faculty of memory cannot be separated from the imagination. They go hand in hand. To one degree or another, we all invent our personal pasts. And for most of us those pasts are built from emotionally colored memories.”
-- Siri HustvedtSource : Siri Hustvedt (2010). “The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves”, p.112, Macmillan
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“I remember thinking how easy it is to speak in clichés, to steal a line from pulp fiction and let it fall. We can only hover around the inexpressible with our words anyway, and there is comfort in saying what we have heard before.”
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“The truth is that personality inevitably bleeds into all forms of our intellectual life. We all extrapolate from our own lives in order to understand the world.”
-- Siri Hustvedt -
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“I will turn human anatomy into roses and stars and sea. I will dissect the beloveds body in metaphor.”
-- Siri HustvedtSource : Siri Hustvedt (2011). “The Summer Without Men: A Novel”, p.84, Macmillan
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“Memory offers up its gifts only when jogged by something in the present. It isn't a storehouse of fixed images and words, but a dynamic associative network in the brain that is never quiet and is subject to revision each time we retrieve an old picture or old words.”
-- Siri Hustvedt -
“Great books are the ones that are urgent, life-changing, the ones that crack open the reader’s skull and heart.”
-- Siri HustvedtSource : Siri Hustvedt (2012). “Living, Thinking, Looking: Essays”, p.63, Macmillan
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“There's a phenomenology of being sick, one that depends on temperament, personal history, and the culture which we live in.”
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“I've often thought that one of us is what we imagine, that each of us normalizes the terrible strangeness of inner life with a variety of convenient fictions.”
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“We sometimes imagine we want what we don't really want.”
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“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 HustvedtSource : Siri Hustvedt (2011). “The Summer Without Men: A Novel”, p.33, Macmillan
#Past Quotes #Past Present And Future Quotes #Amnesia Quotes
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“Reading is perception as translation. The inert signs of an alphabet become living meanings in the mind.”
-- Siri HustvedtSource : Siri Hustvedt (2012). “Living, Thinking, Looking: Essays”, p.133, Macmillan
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“Reading is a private pursuit; one that takes place behind closed doors.”
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“Ture stories can't be told forward, only backward. We invent them from the vantage point of an ever-changing present and tell ourselves how they unfolded.”
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“That night as I lay in bed, I thought of several things I could have said and mourned the fact that my wit usually bloomed late, peaking when it no longer mattered, during the solitary hours close to midnight.”
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“Memory is essential to who we are, and memories can be both implicit and explicit - unconscious and conscious.”
-- Siri HustvedtSource : Siri Hustvedt (2010). “The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves”, p.38, Macmillan
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“under our love making I felt a bleakness that couldnt be dispelled. The sadness was in both of us, and I think we pitied ourselves that night, as if we were other people looking down on the couple who lay together on the bed”
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“Pain is always emotional. Fear and depression keep constant company with chronic hurting.”
-- Siri HustvedtSource : Siri Hustvedt (2010). “The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves”, p.179, Macmillan
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“We read each other through our eyes, and anatomically they are an extension of our brains. When we catch someone's eye, we look into a mind.”
-- Siri HustvedtSource : Siri Hustvedt (2008). “The Sorrows of an American: A Novel”, p.36, Macmillan
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“I don't want the words to be naked the way they are in faxes or in the computer. I want them to be covered by an envelope that you have to rip open in order to get at. I want there to be a waiting time -a pause between the writing and the reading. I want us to be careful about what we say to each other. I want the miles between us to be real and long. This will be our law -that we write our dailiness and our suffering very, very carefully.”
-- Siri Hustvedt -
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“In effect, painting is the still memory of [the artist's] human motion, and our individual responses to it depend on who we are, on our character, which underlines the simple truth that no person leaves himself behind in order to look at a painting.”
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“Like countless first-year medical students, immersed in the symptoms of one disease after another, I am alert to the tingles and pangs, the throbs and quivers of my mortal body, each one of which is potentially a sign of the end.”
-- Siri Hustvedt
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