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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
Self
Demands
Complicated
Expectations
Demand
Making
Paternal
Culture
Generated
Mother
Internals
Women
Internal

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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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Pain is always emotional. Fear and depression keep constant company with chronic hurting.
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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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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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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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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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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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Memory is essential to who we are, and memories can be both implicit and explicit - unconscious and conscious.
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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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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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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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Writing fiction is like remembering what never happened.
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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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A book is a collaboration between the one who reads and what is read and, at its best, that coming together is a love story like any other.
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Memory changes as a person matures.
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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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Men generally do not see women as competition.
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Reading is a private pursuit one that takes place behind closed doors.
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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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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