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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
Point
Unfolded
Tell
Vantage
Stories
Backward
Ever
Invent
Changing
Forward
Told
Present
More quotes by Siri Hustvedt
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
I will turn human anatomy into roses and stars and sea. I will dissect the beloveds body in metaphor.
Siri Hustvedt
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.
Siri Hustvedt
Every painting is always two paintings: The one you see, and the one you remember.
Siri Hustvedt
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
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
Good books, written by men or women, are ones in which you lose consciousness of the person writing the sentences.
Siri Hustvedt
Memory is essential to who we are, and memories can be both implicit and explicit - unconscious and conscious.
Siri Hustvedt
There's a phenomenology of being sick, one that depends on temperament, personal history, and the culture which we live in.
Siri Hustvedt
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
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.
Siri Hustvedt
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
Demonstration of mastery gives a feeling of power and that feeling of power is a good feeling.
Siri Hustvedt
All human states are organic brain states - happiness, sadness, fear, lust, dreaming, doing math problems and writing novels - and our brains are not static.
Siri Hustvedt
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
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
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.
Siri Hustvedt
Depression is when you think there's nothing to be done. Fortunately I always think there's something to be done.
Siri Hustvedt
Great books are the ones that are urgent, life-changing, the ones that crack open the reader’s skull and heart.
Siri Hustvedt
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