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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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Siri Hustvedt
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: February 19
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Northfield
Minnesota
Premio princesa de Asturias 2019
Ever
Invent
Changing
Forward
Told
Present
Point
Unfolded
Tell
Vantage
Stories
Backward

More quotes by Siri Hustvedt

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Pain is always emotional. Fear and depression keep constant company with chronic hurting.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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There is this assumption that much of what I write is about my life, and that simply is not true.
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I think that it's important for people to read philosophy and literature is not because I think everyone should be a well-rounded human being, but because it will help you think better about what you are doing.
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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There's a phenomenology of being sick, one that depends on temperament, personal history, and the culture which we live in.
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?
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Great books are the ones that are urgent, life-changing, the ones that crack open the reader’s skull and heart.
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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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Correlation is not cause, it is just a 'music of chance'.
Siri Hustvedt
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Dreaming is another form of thinking, more concrete, more economical, more visual, and often more emotional than the thoughts of the day, but a thinking through of the day, nevertheless.
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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Memory changes as a person matures.
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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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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Writing fiction is like remembering what never happened.
Siri Hustvedt
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Human beings are repetitive animals. All meaning is generated through repetition.
Siri Hustvedt
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Depression is when you think there's nothing to be done. Fortunately I always think there's something to be done.
Siri Hustvedt