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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.

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
Hand
Faculty
Another
Degree
Hands
Degrees
Cannot
Memory
Pasts
Past
Built
Colored
Personal
Separated
Memories
Invent
Imagination
Emotionally

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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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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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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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We lose ourselves in stories that's the beauty of literary art.
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Demonstration of mastery gives a feeling of power and that feeling of power is a good feeling.
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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.
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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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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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Memory is essential to who we are, and memories can be both implicit and explicit - unconscious and conscious.
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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.
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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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Memory changes as a person matures.
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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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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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Every painting is always two paintings: The one you see, and the one you remember.
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Reading is a private pursuit one that takes place behind closed doors.
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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.
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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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No matter how brilliant or accomplished they are, there is something emasculating for men in being pitted against a woman. It is even more true in creative fields already considered to be squishy and feminine, and it's a big problem because great women have been left off the record.
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