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"The faculty of memory cannot be separated from the imagination. They go hand in hand. To one degree or another, we all invent our personal pasts. And for most of us those pasts are built from emotionally colored memories."
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"Memory is a few lines snipped from a larger story that we are privileged to tuck away between the pages of our minds."

"Tell me about your family," I said. And so she did. I listened intently as my mother went through each branch of the tree. Years later, after the funeral, Maria had asked me questions about the family - who was related to whom - and I struggled. I couldn't remember. A big chunk of our history had been buried with my mother. You should never let your past disappear that way."

"My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?"

"Hey, it's Col. I'm standing in a soybean field outside of Gutshot, Tennessee, which is a long story, and it's hot. K. I'm standing here sweating like I had hyperhidrosis, that disease where you sweat a lot. Crap. That's not interesting. But anyway, it's hot, and so I'm thinking about cold to stay cool. And I was remembering walking through the snow coming back from the ridiculous movie. Do you remember that, K? We were on Giddings, and the snow made it so quiet, I couldn't hear a thing in the world but you. And it was so cold then, and so silent, and I loved you so much. Now it's hot, and dead quiet again, and I love you still."

"Perhaps it was an afterimage, I decided, or a ghost: something that had stirred in my mind, for a moment, so powerfully that I believed it to be real, but now was gone, and faded into the past like a memory forgotten, or a shadow into the dusk."
Explore more quotes by Siri Hustvedt


"There is no future without a past, because what is to be cannot be imagined except as a form of repetition."


"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."


"Each person does see the world in a different way. There is not a single, unifying, objective truth. We're all limited by our perspective."


"Not telling is just as interesting as telling I have found. Why speech, that short verbal journey from inside to outside can be excrutiating under certain circumstances is fascinating."


"This feeling of being "home at last" corresponds to my idea about the city, and idea shaped by books, movies, and plays, an idea of infinite possibility."


"Again, I don't fully understand my emotion response to the library or trust it. It was the site of a series of intellectual revelations that were crucial to me, not just as a student but as a human being."


"It can only be that places left behind often become emotionally simplified - that they sound a single note of pain or pleasure, which means that they are never what they were."


"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."
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