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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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"You see it everywhere and everyone seems to be doing it but you. You could have had it as well, and you know it, and that's what bothers you. Your worst enemy is yourself, and sadly, you know that what you did wasn't worth what you lost."

"One of the most difficult things to think about in life is one's regrets. Something will happen to you, and you will do the wrong thing, and for years afterward you will wish you had done something different."

"One important theme is the extent to which one can ever correct an error, especially outside any frame of religious forgiveness. All of us have done something we regret - how we manage to remove that from our conscience, or whether that's even possible, interested me."

"Regrets are a terrible thing to live with but, if we take a good look at them, some are not regrets at all, they're situations that taught us a valuable lesson. Don't be so hard on yourself it's not a perfect world."

"Our regrets want to bring back many things we leave behind."
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."

"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'."

"As one of four daughters, I grew up with an imaginary brother - wondering what it would have been like if one of us had been a boy. There's no question that there was a phantom boy child in my imagination when I was young."

"It may be that I link every library to that first one - to my early childhood experience of drawing on the floor near my father's desk. A library is of course a real place, but it is also an unreal one. What happens there is mostly silent. I think I've always liked the whispering aspect of libraries, the hushing librarians and my feeling of solitude among many."

"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."

"Immigration inevitably involves error and revision. What I imagined it would be, it's not. For better or worse, some mistake is unavoidable."

"Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense."

"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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