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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
Told
Present
Point
Unfolded
Tell
Vantage
Stories
Backward
Ever
Invent
Changing
Forward

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.
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Memory changes as a person matures.
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Good books, written by men or women, are ones in which you lose consciousness of the person writing the sentences.
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Many writers over the centuries simply do not have the reputations they deserve because they were female, and that is an act of suppression.
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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.
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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
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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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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.
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Memory is essential to who we are, and memories can be both implicit and explicit - unconscious and conscious.
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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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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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Demonstration of mastery gives a feeling of power and that feeling of power is a good feeling.
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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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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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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Writing fiction is like remembering what never happened.
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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We lose ourselves in stories that's the beauty of literary art.
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.
Siri Hustvedt
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Correlation is not cause, it is just a 'music of chance'.
Siri Hustvedt