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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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Siri Hustvedt
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: February 19
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Northfield
Minnesota
Premio princesa de Asturias 2019
Mother
Internals
Women
Internal
Self
Demands
Complicated
Expectations
Demand
Making
Paternal
Culture
Generated

More quotes by Siri Hustvedt

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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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Depression is when you think there's nothing to be done. Fortunately I always think there's something to be done.
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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.
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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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Memory is essential to who we are, and memories can be both implicit and explicit - unconscious and conscious.
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Memory changes as a person matures.
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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's a phenomenology of being sick, one that depends on temperament, personal history, and the culture which we live in.
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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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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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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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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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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.
Siri Hustvedt
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There is this assumption that much of what I write is about my life, and that simply is not true.
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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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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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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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
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Human beings are repetitive animals. All meaning is generated through repetition.
Siri Hustvedt
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Correlation is not cause, it is just a 'music of chance'.
Siri Hustvedt