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"The truth is that what fascinates me is not so much being in a place as not being there: how places live in the mind once you have left them, how they are imagined before you arrive, or how they are seemingly called out of nothing to illustrate a thought or story like my tree down yonder. These mental spaces map our Innes lives more fully than any "real" map, delineating the borders of here and there that also shape what we see in the present."
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Exlpore more Memory quotes
"Memory is a few lines snipped from a larger story that we are privileged to tuck away between the pages of our minds."
"Only later, much later, too late, did I understand how small she (Mrs Winterson) was to herself. The baby nobody picked up. The uncarried child still inside her."
"Scent is the strongest tie to memory."
"The pleasure of remembering had been taken from me, because there was no longer anyone to remember with. It felt like losing your co-rememberer meant losing the memory itself, as if the things we'd done were less real and important than they had been hours before."
"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."
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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