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

More quotes by Siri Hustvedt

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Every painting is always two paintings: The one you see, and the one you remember.
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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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Memory changes as a person matures.
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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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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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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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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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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 is essential to who we are, and memories can be both implicit and explicit - unconscious and conscious.
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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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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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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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Pain is always emotional. Fear and depression keep constant company with chronic hurting.
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Writing fiction is like remembering what never happened.
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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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Correlation is not cause, it is just a 'music of chance'.
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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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Reading is a private pursuit one that takes place behind closed doors.
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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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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