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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.

Siri Hustvedt

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Siri Hustvedt
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: February 19
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Northfield
Minnesota
Premio princesa de Asturias 2019
Language
Strangeness
Happens
Crossed
Body
Threshold
Sometimes
Notice
Boundaries
Crosses
Outside
Inside

More quotes by Siri Hustvedt

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Being a mother is complicated because its not just a paternal culture making demands on you its those internal demands and expectations that women have and are self-generated.
Siri Hustvedt
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Good books, written by men or women, are ones in which you lose consciousness of the person writing the sentences.
Siri Hustvedt
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Women really are not supposed to be imaginative. That creativity of this kind is supposed to belong to men. You know, because women make babies. I find the double standards shocking.
Siri Hustvedt
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Pain is always emotional. Fear and depression keep constant company with chronic hurting.
Siri Hustvedt
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No matter how brilliant or accomplished they are, there is something emasculating for men in being pitted against a woman. It is even more true in creative fields already considered to be squishy and feminine, and it's a big problem because great women have been left off the record.
Siri Hustvedt
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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 Hustvedt
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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.
Siri Hustvedt
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There is this assumption that much of what I write is about my life, and that simply is not true.
Siri Hustvedt
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I think because mothers usually are the people who take care of us when we're little, and when we're little those mothers are omnipotent, perhaps men even more than women don't like to think about that dependency. That dependency is horror.
Siri Hustvedt
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Memory changes as a person matures.
Siri Hustvedt
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Human beings are repetitive animals. All meaning is generated through repetition.
Siri Hustvedt
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Men generally do not see women as competition.
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 Hustvedt
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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.
Siri Hustvedt
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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.
Siri Hustvedt
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Intellectual curiosity about one's own illness is certainly born of a desire for mastery. If I couldn't cure myself, perhaps I could at least begin to understand myself.
Siri Hustvedt
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It is fascinating to me that when the lists of the great writers are trotted out year after year, you often find lists without a single woman mentioned.
Siri Hustvedt
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Whenever I sign books, I get this line over and over again from men: I don't read fiction, but my wife does. Would you sign the book to her? What are those men doing there? And where are their wives?
Siri Hustvedt
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Bedtime rituals for children ease the way to the elsewhere of slumber - teeth brushing and pajamas, the voice of a parent reading, the feel and smell of the old blanket or toy, the nightlight glowing in a corner.
Siri Hustvedt
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The fictive is an emormous territory it turns out, its boundaries vague, and there is little certainty about where it begins and ends.
Siri Hustvedt