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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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Siri Hustvedt
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: February 19
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Northfield
Minnesota
Premio princesa de Asturias 2019
Writing
Brain
Dreaming
Happiness
Brains
Fear
Novels
Dream
Lust
Problem
Math
States
Sadness
Human
Novel
Static
Humans
Problems
Organic

More quotes by Siri Hustvedt

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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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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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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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Reading is a private pursuit one that takes place behind closed doors.
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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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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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Demonstration of mastery gives a feeling of power and that feeling of power is a good feeling.
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.
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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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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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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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.
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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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.
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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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.
Siri Hustvedt
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Human beings are repetitive animals. All meaning is generated through repetition.
Siri Hustvedt
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Writing fiction is like remembering what never happened.
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