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"The best works of art are never innocuous: they alter the viewer's perceptual predictions. It is only when the patterns of our vision are disrupted that we truly pay attention and must ask ourselves what we are looking at."
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"The eye is the jewel of the body."

"The subject may be crude and repulsive. Its expression is artistically modulated and balanced. This is style. This is art. This is the only thing that really matters in books."

"Purposefully look for something beautiful today."

"There is something majestic in the bad taste of Italy."

"There stood a young man who had the figure of a Greek athlete and the face of an English one...Just where he began to be beautiful the clothes started."

"Beauty is the virtue of the body as virtue is the beauty of the soul."

"Black as night and as beautiful as forever."

"Art must always stand guard against stirring emotions that lie outside the aesthetic: sexual arousal, terror, disgust, shock."
Explore more quotes by Siri Hustvedt


"Artists are cannibals. We consume other artists, and they become part of us-flesh and bone-only to be spewed out again in our own works."


"I am fascinated that no one I have read seems to have noticed that the literature on Picasso continually turns grown-up women into girls."


"Every reader writes the book he or she reads, supplying what isn't there, and that creative invention becomes the book."


"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."


"We all start out the same in our mothers' wombs. We, all of us, when floating in the amniotic sea of our earliest oblivion, have gonads. If the Y chromosome didn't swoop in to act on the gonads of some of us and make testes, we would all become women. In biology, the Genesis story is reversed: Adam becomes Adam out of Eve, not the other way around."


"The bottle of red brush on a white table gleamed throughout the remaining years of my childhood as the sign of what was possible there."


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