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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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"What makes people tick? Life can be a trap of ennui, but imagery may be a redemptive escape from dullness. The iconic power and exuberance of images generate an inexorable addiction that needs to be gratified without respite. Here and now! ['Give me more images']"

"The monotony and solitude of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind."

"For me poetry is an evasion of the real job of writing prose."

"A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness."

"At eight, he had once told his mother that he wanted to paint air."

"My brain has become my enemy. We fight over creation and his need for sleep."

"Creativity is the residue of time wasted."

"The great poet Hafiz says that you should dye your prayer-carpet with wine if your teacher tells you to do so."

"I do not attachany exaggerated importance to my poetical works. Life isthere to be lived rather than to be written about. My aimis to search out the manifold experience that it offers,wringing from each moment what of emotion it presents.I look upon my writing as a graceful accomplishmentwhich does not absorb but rather adds pleasure toexistence. And as for posterity-damn posterity."

"I have spent a good many years since-too many, I think-being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction or poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that's all."
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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