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
Property
Memories
Words
Syntax
Language
Coherence
Time
Tense
Fragments
Imagined
Memory

More quotes by Siri Hustvedt

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Writing fiction is like remembering what never happened.
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Reading is a private pursuit one that takes place behind closed doors.
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Pain is always emotional. Fear and depression keep constant company with chronic hurting.
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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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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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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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Every painting is always two paintings: The one you see, and the one you remember.
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We lose ourselves in stories that's the beauty of literary art.
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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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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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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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The fictive is an emormous territory it turns out, its boundaries vague, and there is little certainty about where it begins and ends.
Siri Hustvedt
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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.
Siri Hustvedt
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Human beings are repetitive animals. All meaning is generated through repetition.
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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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Great books are the ones that are urgent, life-changing, the ones that crack open the reader’s skull and heart.
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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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
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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.
Siri Hustvedt
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Correlation is not cause, it is just a 'music of chance'.
Siri Hustvedt