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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
Reader
Ones
Open
Skull
Books
Skulls
Book
Crack
Great
Urgent
Heart
Cracks
Life
Changing

More quotes by 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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I think because mothers usually are the people who take care of us when we're little, and when we're little those mothers are omnipotent, perhaps men even more than women don't like to think about that dependency. That dependency is horror.
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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Every painting is always two paintings: The one you see, and the one you remember.
Siri Hustvedt
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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.
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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Memory changes as a person matures.
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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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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Writing fiction is like remembering what never happened.
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
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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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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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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.
Siri Hustvedt
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Human beings are repetitive animals. All meaning is generated through repetition.
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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Reading is a private pursuit one that takes place behind closed doors.
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.
Siri Hustvedt
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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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We lose ourselves in stories that's the beauty of literary art.
Siri Hustvedt