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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
Always
Paintings
Painting
Two
Remember
Every

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Reading is a private pursuit one that takes place behind closed doors.
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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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Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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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There's a phenomenology of being sick, one that depends on temperament, personal history, and the culture which we live in.
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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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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.
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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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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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Writing fiction is like remembering what never happened.
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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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Human beings are repetitive animals. All meaning is generated through repetition.
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We lose ourselves in stories that's the beauty of literary art.
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Correlation is not cause, it is just a 'music of chance'.
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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.
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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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Men generally do not see women as competition.
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