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

More quotes by Siri Hustvedt

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We lose ourselves in stories that's the beauty of literary art.
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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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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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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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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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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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Reading is a private pursuit one that takes place behind closed doors.
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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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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.
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Writing fiction is like remembering what never happened.
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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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Good books, written by men or women, are ones in which you lose consciousness of the person writing the sentences.
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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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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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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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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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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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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?
Siri Hustvedt