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"What she remembered is undoubtedly something so radically different from the image I gave to her memory that the two may be incompatible."
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"At last he said, "Did you come out of the big mountains?"Gitano shook his head slowly. "No, I walked down the Salinas Valley."The afternoon thought would not let Joey go. "Did you ever go into the big mountains back there?"The old dark eyes grew fixed, and their light turned inward on the years that were living in Gitano's head."

"There are times that one treasures for all one's life, and such times are burned clearly and sharply on the material of total recall. I felt very fortunate that morning."

"I remember my childhood names for grasses and secret flowers. I remember where a toad may live and what time the birds awaken in the summer -- and what trees and seasons smelled like -- how people looked and walked and smelled even. The memory of odors is very rich."

"Make someone feel something and you will never be forgotten."

"This is only a record of broken and apparently unrelated memories, some of them as distinct and sequent as brilliant beads upon a thread, others remote and strange, having the character of crimson dreams with interspaces blank and black -- witch-fires glowing still and red in a great desolation."

"I could isolate, consciously, little. Everything seemed blurred, yellow-clouded, yielding nothing tangible. Her inept acrostics, maudlin evasions, theopathies - every recollection formed ripples of mysterious meaning. Everything seemed yellowly blurred, illusive, lost."
Explore more quotes by Siri Hustvedt


"There is no reason we should expect young children to enter the nocturnal darkness of sleep and dreams without help."


"It encapsulates so neatly the lesson of expectation and reality that it could serve as a parable. The fact that tomatoes are good is beside the point. If you think you're getting an apple, a tomato will revolt you. That New York should be nicknamed the Big Apple, that an apple is the fruit of humankind's first error and the expulsion from paradise, that America and paradise have been linked and confused ever since Europeans first hit its shores, makes the story reverberate as myth."


"True 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."


"I know, but he must have felt it that way, that evil was an emptiness, a lack of something, not a presence.'He turned his head fast and looked at me. 'That's what desire is, isn't it? The lack of something."


"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."


"Infancy is irretrievable. Its memories live underground. To what extent they return by stealth or are triggered by various catalysts remains an ongoing question."


"Transformation of the self are related to where you are, and identity Is dependent on others."


"It appears that time has turned that young woman, who imagined herself a romantic heroine, into something of a comic character, but I remain fond of her. We are relatives, after all."
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