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Writing fiction is like remembering what never happened.

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
Like
Remembering
Fiction
Happened
Remember
Writing
Never

More quotes by 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.
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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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I will turn human anatomy into roses and stars and sea. I will dissect the beloveds body in metaphor.
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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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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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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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Pain is always emotional. Fear and depression keep constant company with chronic hurting.
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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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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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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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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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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.
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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.
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Demonstration of mastery gives a feeling of power and that feeling of power is a good feeling.
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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.
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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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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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Memory is essential to who we are, and memories can be both implicit and explicit - unconscious and conscious.
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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