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"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."
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"The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity."

"Memories, imagination, old sentiments, and associations are more readily reached through the sense of smell than through any other channel."

"Never tell to much. The monster is always scarier when it is still under the child's bed."

"How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all."

"Only imagination and belief can differentiate from the rest certain objects, certain people, and can create an atmosphere."

"Dinner-parties bore us because our imagination is absent, and reading interests us because it is keeping us company."

"Enthusiasm is that temper of the mind in which the imagination has got the better of the judgment."

"We are more often frightened than hurt; and we suffer more from imagination than from reality."
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."


"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."


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


"Because I knew so much about him, because I had been close to him, I couldn't bring the various fragments of my experience with him into a single coherent image. The truth was mobile and contradictory, and I was willing to live with that."


"I've always thought of wholeness and integration as necessary myths. We're fragmented beings who cement ourselves together, but there are always cracks. Living with the cracks is part of being, well, reasonably healthy."


"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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