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

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Pain is always emotional. Fear and depression keep constant company with chronic hurting.
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All human states are organic brain states - happiness, sadness, fear, lust, dreaming, doing math problems and writing novels - and our brains are not static.
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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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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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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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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.
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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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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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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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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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I will turn human anatomy into roses and stars and sea. I will dissect the beloveds body in metaphor.
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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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The fictive is an emormous territory it turns out, its boundaries vague, and there is little certainty about where it begins and ends.
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Memory changes as a person matures.
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Every painting is always two paintings: The one you see, and the one you remember.
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