Siri Hustvedt - The Sorrows of an American (2008)

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We read each other through our eyes, and anatomically they are an extension of our brains. When we catch someone's eye, we look into a mind.

Siri Hustvedt

I've always thought of wholeness and integration as necessary myths. We're fragmented beings who cement ourselves together, but there are always cracks. Living with the cracks is part of being, well, reasonably healthy.

Siri Hustvedt

Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.

Siri Hustvedt

I've often thought that one of us is what we imagine, that each of us normalizes the terrible strangeness of inner life with a variety of convenient fictions.

Siri Hustvedt

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.

Siri Hustvedt

Memory offers up its gifts only when jogged by something in the present. It isn't a storehouse of fixed images and words, but a dynamic associative network in the brain that is never quiet and is subject to revision each time we retrieve an old picture or old words.

Siri Hustvedt

Crippled and crazy, we hobble toward the finish line, pen in hand.

Siri Hustvedt