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

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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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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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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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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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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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Every painting is always two paintings: The one you see, and the one you remember.
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Men generally do not see women as competition.
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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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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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Reading is a private pursuit one that takes place behind closed doors.
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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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Good books, written by men or women, are ones in which you lose consciousness of the person writing the sentences.
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Correlation is not cause, it is just a 'music of chance'.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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