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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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Siri Hustvedt
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: February 19
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Northfield
Minnesota
Premio princesa de Asturias 2019
Paintings
Painting
Two
Remember
Every
Always

More quotes by Siri Hustvedt

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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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We lose ourselves in stories that's the beauty of literary art.
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Pain is always emotional. Fear and depression keep constant company with chronic hurting.
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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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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.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Many writers over the centuries simply do not have the reputations they deserve because they were female, and that is an act of suppression.
Siri Hustvedt
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We read each other through our eyes, and anatomically they are an extension of our brains. When we catch someone's eye, we look into a mind.
Siri Hustvedt
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Correlation is not cause, it is just a 'music of chance'.
Siri Hustvedt
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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.
Siri Hustvedt
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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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Great books are the ones that are urgent, life-changing, the ones that crack open the reader’s skull and heart.
Siri Hustvedt