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"There's a phenomenology of being sick, one that depends on temperament, personal history, and the culture which we live in."
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"The good thing about having this illness is that it allows me to be a little bit crazy."
"I love the imagery of struggle. I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of just being a gravely endangered patient. Allow me to inform you, though, that when you sit in a room with a set of other finalists, and kindly people bring a huge transparent bag of poison and plug it into your arm, and you either read or don't read a book while the venom sack gradually empties itself into your system, the image of the ardent solider is the very last one that will occur to you. You feel swamped with passivity and impotence: dissolving in powerlessness like a sugar lump in water."
"Don't tell me you're one of those people who becomes their disease. I know so many people like that. It's disheartening. Like, cancer is in the growth business, right? The taking-people-over business. But surely you haven't let it succeed prematurely."
"I felt Mr Willard had deserted me. I thought he must have planned it all along, but Buddy said No, his father simply couldn't stand the sight of sickness and especially his own son's sickness, because he thought all sickness was sickness of the will. Mr Willard had never been sick a day in his life."
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."
"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."
"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."
"Maybe the world isn't enough, or maybe the distinction between the world and fiction is not so clear. Fiction is made from the stuff of the world, after all, which includes dreams and wishes and fantasies and memory. And it is never really made alone, but from the material between and among us: language."
"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."
"Infancy is irretrievable. Its memories live underground. To what extent they return by stealth or are triggered by various catalysts remains an ongoing question."
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