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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 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."

"MS is not really a degenerative illness. It is not fatal, nor is it always progressive."

"ALS is like a lit candle: it melts your nerves and leaves your body a pile of wax.. you cannot support yourself standing.. you cannot sit up straight. By the end, if you are still alive.. your soul, perfectly awake, is imprisoned inside a limp husk.. like something from a science fiction movie, the man frozen inside his own flesh."

"My biggest excuse to others and myself was that I had writer's block, as if it was some kind of illness."

"Cases of sickness made up a very small percentage which in my opinion was normal. However, propaganda pamphlets dropped from aircraft were telling the workers to feign illness, and detailed instructions were given to them on how to do it."
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."

"Creativity has always depended on openness and flexibility, so let us hope for more of both in the future."

"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."

"Ture 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."

"It's hard to penetrate characters who are very cut off and lack empathy and to do it with sympathy. It's so easy to make a damaged character repugnant."

"If something's not working, it's wonderful to have a reader you can trust to say, 'Actually, you've gone off the deep end here'."

"Old places fire the internal weather of our pasts. The mild winds, aching calms, and hard storms of forgotten emotions return to us when we return to the spots where they happened."

"The stories and pictures I make for the lives of the people closest to me are the forms of my empathy."

"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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