Siri Hustvedt Quotes

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Siri Hustvedt

Profession : Novelist

Birth : February 19, 1955

My greatest pleasure is spending time with my family: my husband and daughter, but also my mother, my three sisters, and their families.

Siri Hustvedt

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

Siri Hustvedt

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.

Siri Hustvedt

Children are not in a position to assess risk and safety; it must be done for them, and it must be done carefully.

Siri Hustvedt

Rage has such focus. It can't go on forever, but it's invigorating.

Siri Hustvedt

Perception plays a vital role in the diagnosis of bipolar illness. Symptoms are perceived through the categories of psychiatric medicine at a given moment in history, categories which are continually shifting and being named or renamed.

Siri Hustvedt

Every time the DSM prepares for a new edition, there are countless groups lobbying to get their particular mental illness recognized by the diagnostic manual. Surely, this is a social and cultural phenomenon.

Siri Hustvedt

The mind-brain is lived only from a first-person perspective, and it is a dynamic, plastic organ that changes in relation to the environment.

Siri Hustvedt

The computer model will be replaced by an organic model, in which the brain-mind is embodied - part of a whole, dynamic, living organism: one driven by emotional forces, not only cognitive ones.

Siri Hustvedt

I'd been writing poems for many years, but most of them I didn't like. Then, when I was 23, I wrote one I did like, sent it to 'The Paris Review' - the highest publication I could think of - and they accepted it. No other moment in my literary life has quite come close to that.

Siri Hustvedt

When I taught writing classes to psychiatric patients, I met people whose stories of manic highs and immobilizing lows appeared to be textbook descriptions of classic bipolar disorder. I met other patients who had been diagnosed with myriad disorders. No doctor seemed to agree about what they actually suffered from.

Siri Hustvedt

I've come to understand that migraine is a part of the personality. I have migraine troughs. These often follow high productivity. I have a hypo-manic phase, then I'll crash.

Siri Hustvedt

Flashbacks rarely involve language. Mine certainly didn't. They were visual, motor, and sensory, and they took place in a relentless, horrifying present.

Siri Hustvedt

In August of 2002, I survived a car accident. Although I can still see the van speeding toward us, I cannot bring to mind the crash itself - only its aftermath.

Siri Hustvedt

I love the little garden in the back of my family's brownstone in Brooklyn. Digging out there in the dirt is a joy for me, although by the time August rolls around and my roses have black spot, I need the break winter provides.

Siri Hustvedt

The relationship between the imagined and the real is more complicated than people imagine.

Siri Hustvedt

I saw Joseph Cornell's lyrical work for the first time at the Museum of Modern Art in the late seventies and have internalized many of his boxes.

Siri Hustvedt

I have found that all of my memories seem to need a place and that a good part of what we think of as explicit memory has to do with location.

Siri Hustvedt

Most of us accept that although we may believe our dreams to be real events, upon waking, we can tell the difference between nocturnal hallucinations and reality.

Siri Hustvedt

I enjoy domestic life. Cooking gives me great pleasure, especially if I can chop vegetables slowly and think about what I'm doing and dream a little about this and that.

Siri Hustvedt