Quote

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

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Siri Hustvedt
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: February 19
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Northfield
Minnesota
Premio princesa de Asturias 2019
Time
Tense
Fragments
Imagined
Memory
Property
Memories
Words
Syntax
Language
Coherence

More quotes by Siri Hustvedt

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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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Writing fiction is like remembering what never happened.
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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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Every painting is always two paintings: The one you see, and the one you remember.
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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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Memory changes as a person matures.
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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.
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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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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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Reading is a private pursuit one that takes place behind closed doors.
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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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Pain is always emotional. Fear and depression keep constant company with chronic hurting.
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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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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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Correlation is not cause, it is just a 'music of chance'.
Siri Hustvedt
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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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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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There's a phenomenology of being sick, one that depends on temperament, personal history, and the culture which we live in.
Siri Hustvedt
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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.
Siri Hustvedt
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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.
Siri Hustvedt