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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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Siri Hustvedt
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: February 19
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Northfield
Minnesota
Premio princesa de Asturias 2019
Books
Skulls
Book
Crack
Great
Urgent
Heart
Cracks
Life
Changing
Reader
Ones
Open
Skull

More quotes by Siri Hustvedt

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Good books, written by men or women, are ones in which you lose consciousness of the person writing the sentences.
Siri Hustvedt
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Memory is essential to who we are, and memories can be both implicit and explicit - unconscious and conscious.
Siri Hustvedt
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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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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
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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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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.
Siri Hustvedt
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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.
Siri Hustvedt
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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.
Siri Hustvedt
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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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Correlation is not cause, it is just a 'music of chance'.
Siri Hustvedt
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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.
Siri Hustvedt
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Memory changes as a person matures.
Siri Hustvedt
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There is this assumption that much of what I write is about my life, and that simply is not true.
Siri Hustvedt
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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.
Siri Hustvedt
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Every painting is always two paintings: The one you see, and the one you remember.
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.
Siri Hustvedt
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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.
Siri Hustvedt
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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.
Siri Hustvedt
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Pain is always emotional. Fear and depression keep constant company with chronic hurting.
Siri Hustvedt
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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.
Siri Hustvedt