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"The history of art is full of women lying around naked for erotic consumption by men."
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"Poetry most often communicates emotions, not directly, but by creating imaginatively the grounds for those emotions. It therefore communicates something more than the emotion; only by means of that something more does it communicate the emotion at all."

"We often forget to draw a new picture because we are so busy criticizing other paintings."

"A beautiful poem is nothing but a mirror of philosophy through which we can see life's pure beauty."

"Poets create a beautiful blue sky where you can fly with wings of imagination and find yourself again and again."

"The object of art is to enhance the beauty, imaginations and joy of life."

"A picture may be worth a thousand words, but those well-arranged words are worth a multi-million-dollar motion picture."

"Literature tries to express the intricate inner beauties of life. Philosophy tries to explain the intricate inner beauties and conflicts of thoughts."
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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"That is the strangeness of language: it crosses the boundaries of the body, is at once inside and outside, and it sometimes happens that we don't notice the threshold has been crossed."

"I imagined Stephen's companion was a beautiful woman. Her form and coloring changed with my moving thoughts, but the idea that she existed remained to nag at me, and even though she was only a spook of my jealousy, I couldn't stop the surge of fantasies about her and Stephen. By the time I left the library, I had invented several elaborate plots involving the two of them."

"What she remembered is undoubtedly something so radically different from the image I gave to her memory that the two may be incompatible."

"The tangible and intangible collide to cast a spell. But can a person or thing ever be stripped naked? Can we ever discover reality hiding under the meanings we give to people and things? I don't think so. And I don't think Fitzgerald thought so either. His book meditates on the necessity of fiction, not only as lies but as truths."

"We drank coffee. We talked. She loved Charles Dickens, whom she read in Norwegian. Years after she was dead, I wrote a dissertation on Dickens, and though my study of the great man would no doubt have alarmed her, I had a funny feeling that by taking on the English novelist I was returning to my Norwegian roots."

"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."
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