Siri Hustvedt Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
More Siri Hustvedt quote about:
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“Every painting is always two paintings: The one you see, and the one you remember.”
-- Siri Hustvedt -
“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 Hustvedt -
“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.”
-- Siri Hustvedt -
“There is no future without a past, because what is to be cannot be imagined except as a form of repetition.”
-- Siri Hustvedt -
“Dreams are stories made by and for the dreamer, and each dreamer has his own folds to open and knots to untie.”
-- Siri Hustvedt -
“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 Hustvedt -
“Every sickness has an alien quality, a feeling of invasion and loss of control that is evident in the language we use about it.”
-- 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 -
“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 Hustvedt -
“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.”
-- Siri Hustvedt -
“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 -
“I will turn human anatomy into roses and stars and sea. I will dissect the beloveds body in metaphor.”
-- Siri Hustvedt -
“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 Hustvedt -
“There's a phenomenology of being sick, one that depends on temperament, personal history, and the culture which we live in.”
-- Siri Hustvedt -
“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.”
-- Siri Hustvedt -
“We sometimes imagine we want what we don't really want.”
-- Siri Hustvedt -
“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 Hustvedt -
“Reading is perception as translation. The inert signs of an alphabet become living meanings in the mind.”
-- Siri Hustvedt -
“Reading is a private pursuit; one that takes place behind closed doors.”
-- Siri Hustvedt -
“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.”
-- Siri Hustvedt -
“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.”
-- Siri Hustvedt -
“Memory is essential to who we are, and memories can be both implicit and explicit - unconscious and conscious.”
-- Siri Hustvedt -
“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”
-- Siri Hustvedt -
“Pain is always emotional. Fear and depression keep constant company with chronic hurting.”
-- Siri Hustvedt -
“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 Hustvedt -
“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 -
“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.”
-- Siri Hustvedt -
“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
