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"The advice is a call to empathy, the ultimate act of the imagination, and the true ground of all fiction."
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"A merciful heart beats contently stronger than many vengeful ones."

"When you have dogs, you witness their uncomplaining acceptance of suffering, their bright desire to make the most of life in spite of the limitations of age and disease, their calm awareness of the approaching end when their final hours come. They accept death with a grace that I hope I will one day be brave enough to muster."

"I believe we are still so innocent. The species are still so innocent that a person who is apt to be murdered believes that the murderer, just before he puts the final wrench on his throat, will have enough compassion to give him one sweet cup of water."

"What is the nature of the worldly life (sansar)? God lives in every living being of the world, that means if you oppress any living being or cause misery to them, then adharma (unrighteousness, irreligion) will occur. The result (effect) of adharma will be against your desires and the result of dharma (righteousness, religion) will be favorable to your desires."

"Be compassionate ... and take responsibility for each other. If we only learned those lessons, this world would be a better place."

"I call him religious who understands the suffering of others."

"Never underestimate the pains of others but consider yourself lucky."

"He is ugly and sad... but he is all love."

"Try to show grace, mercy and compassion, for one day you may need them."
Explore more quotes by Siri Hustvedt

"But all attractions are alike,' he said. 'They come from an emptiness inside.' He hammered on this chest with his index finger. 'Something's missing and you have to fill it. Books, paintings, people, they're all the same...''A lot of people do without books and paintings.''True,' he said, 'but that doesn't affect the argument.' Paris turned his head to one side and chewed on his lip. 'Of course, nothing ever does the trick. Nobody's really satisfied for long."

"Creativity has always depended on openness and flexibility, so let us hope for more of both in the future."

"There is no perception without memory. But good art surprise us. Good art reorients our expectations, forces us to break the pattern, to see in a new way."

"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."

"It's hard to penetrate characters who are very cut off and lack empathy and to do it with sympathy. It's so easy to make a damaged character repugnant."

"If something's not working, it's wonderful to have a reader you can trust to say, 'Actually, you've gone off the deep end here'."

"Old places fire the internal weather of our pasts. The mild winds, aching calms, and hard storms of forgotten emotions return to us when we return to the spots where they happened."

"The stories and pictures I make for the lives of the people closest to me are the forms of my empathy."

"The truth is that what fascinates me is not so much being in a place as not being there: how places live in the mind once you have left them, how they are imagined before you arrive, or how they are seemingly called out of nothing to illustrate a thought or story like my tree down yonder. These mental spaces map our Innes lives more fully than any "real" map, delineating the borders of here and there that also shape what we see in the present."
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