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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Siri Hustvedt Quotes

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

– Siri Hustvedt

There is no reason we should expect young children to enter the nocturnal darkness of sleep and dreams without help.

– Siri Hustvedt

The brain-mind is not a computer, and regarding it as one has led to a variety of theoretical dead ends.

– Siri Hustvedt

Sleep resistance, bouts of insomnia, nightmares, night terrors, crawling into bed with parents in the middle of the night – all these are so common among children, it seems fair to call them ‘normal.’

– Siri Hustvedt

Both depression and anxiety disorders, for example, are repeatedly described in the media as ‘chemical imbalances in the brain,’ as if spontaneous neural events with no relation to anything outside a person’s brain cause depression and anxiety.

– Siri Hustvedt

Intellectual curiosity about one’s own illness is certainly born of a desire for mastery. If I couldn’t cure myself, perhaps I could at least begin to understand myself.

– Siri Hustvedt

There is a difference between using a made-up name and using real people as pseudonyms. People are not costumes you can wear. They are flesh and blood.

– Siri Hustvedt

Hysteria is something that I’ve been interested for a very long time. I thought I might have it, but it seems that it’s unlikely.

– Siri Hustvedt

None of us is immune to suggestion. We are social beings and live in a social world.

– Siri Hustvedt

I have a tendency to face my bad fantasies in my books.

– Siri Hustvedt

Scientists have a tendency to believe in absolutes, in studies and the repeating of them. Psychoanalysis is firmly based in subjective accounts. We need both.

– 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

The brain is an immensely complex organ, and many mysteries remain. Exactly how brain and mind or soma and psyche are related is one of them.

– Siri Hustvedt

Only time will tell in what ways Freud was prescient and in what ways he failed to understand how the mind functions. For example, no scientist and very few psychoanalysts still embrace Freud’s death instinct.

– Siri Hustvedt

I am not a physician, but I am deeply interested in diagnostic categories and have read extensively in the history of the subject.

– 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

While reading ‘David Copperfield’ in the middle of the night – probably because of the light, I had insomnia for the first time – I looked out of the window and thought, ‘If this is what books can do, this is what I want to do.’

– Siri Hustvedt

Novelists embody plural selves all the time. What are characters, after all, if not other selves?

– Siri Hustvedt

In sleep, we leave behind the sensory stimulation of the outside world.

– Siri Hustvedt

American mass media culture, with its celebrities, shopping hysteria, sound bites, formulaic plots, received ideas, and nauseating repetitions, depresses me.

– Siri Hustvedt

My feeling is, when you are writing an essay, you don’t make anything up. This may be a very Protestant notion, and I’m aware of the fact that memory is fallible, that if I had access to films or some absolute documentary evidence of what happened, it might look different; we get confused and fuzzy.

– Siri Hustvedt

Sigmund Freud makes people irritable. Whenever someone mentions Freud, say, at a dinner party, I see eyes roll and listen to the nasty remarks that follow.

– Siri Hustvedt

I have not been diagnosed with epilepsy. I did have an MRI of the brain, and they found no abnormalities in my brain. Now, there are people with epilepsy who have completely normal MRI’s, too. I just think also, you know, epileptic seizures can be triggered by emotional stress, by all kinds of things, lights.

– Siri Hustvedt

I was 13 when I had my first bout of insomnia. My family was in Reykjavik, Iceland, for the summer, and day never really became night.

– Siri Hustvedt

I have a longstanding fascination with visual art. I do, in fact, draw as well, as I did in ‘The Summer without Men.’ I also write essays about visual art.

– Siri Hustvedt

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’.

– Siri Hustvedt

I am always suspicious of those who impose ‘rules’ on child rearing. Every child is different in terms of temperament and learning, and every parent responds to a particular child, not some generalized infant or youngster.

– Siri Hustvedt

Bedtime rituals for children ease the way to the elsewhere of slumber – teeth brushing and pajamas, the voice of a parent reading, the feel and smell of the old blanket or toy, the nightlight glowing in a corner.

– Siri Hustvedt

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

– Siri Hustvedt

I bought myself a rubber brain, familiarized myself with its many parts, listened intently, and read more. In fact, I read obsessively, as my husband has told me repeatedly. He has even suggested that my rapacious reading resembles an addiction.

– Siri Hustvedt

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