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

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Pain is always emotional. Fear and depression keep constant company with chronic hurting.
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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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Reading is a private pursuit one that takes place behind closed doors.
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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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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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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 is this assumption that much of what I write is about my life, and that simply is not true.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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.
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Men generally do not see women as competition.
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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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I will turn human anatomy into roses and stars and sea. I will dissect the beloveds body in metaphor.
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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.
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We lose ourselves in stories that's the beauty of literary art.
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