{"author":"Siri Hustvedt","author_id":"Siri+Hustvedt","total_quotes":102,"quotes":[{"text":"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.","author":"Siri Hustvedt","tags":["imagination"],"id":6425,"author_id":"Siri+Hustvedt"},{"text":"Infancy is irretrievable. Its memories live underground. To what extent they return by stealth or are triggered by various catalysts remains an ongoing question.","author":"Siri Hustvedt","tags":["catalyst","infancy","memory"],"id":7436,"author_id":"Siri+Hustvedt"},{"text":"The best works of art are never innocuous: they alter the viewer's perceptual predictions. It is only when the patterns of our vision are disrupted that we truly pay attention and must ask ourselves what we are looking at.","author":"Siri Hustvedt","tags":["art"],"id":12069,"author_id":"Siri+Hustvedt"},{"text":"Within weeks of my arrival in New York, I was someone else, not because there had been a revolution in my psychological makeup or any trauma. It was simply this: people saw me in a light in which I had never been seen before.","author":"Siri Hustvedt","tags":["perception"],"id":13034,"author_id":"Siri+Hustvedt"},{"text":"It encapsulates so neatly the lesson of expectation and reality that it could serve as a parable. The fact that tomatoes are good is beside the point. If you think you're getting an apple, a tomato will revolt you. That New York should be nicknamed the Big Apple, that an apple is the fruit of humankind's first error and the expulsion from paradise, that America and paradise have been linked and confused ever since Europeans first hit its shores, makes the story reverberate as myth.","author":"Siri Hustvedt","tags":["expectations","new-york"],"id":16414,"author_id":"Siri+Hustvedt"},{"text":"There is no reason we should expect young children to enter the nocturnal darkness of sleep and dreams without help.","author":"Siri Hustvedt","tags":["children","sleep","darkness "],"id":16536,"author_id":"Siri+Hustvedt"},{"text":"Dreaming is another form of thinking, more concrete, more economical, more visual, and often more emotional than the thoughts of the day, but a thinking through of the day, nevertheless.","author":"Siri Hustvedt","tags":["dreaming","dreams","thinking"],"id":17293,"author_id":"Siri+Hustvedt"},{"text":"I will turn human anatomy into roses and stars and sea. I will dissect the beloveds body in metaphor.","author":"Siri Hustvedt","tags":["anatomy","love","metaphor","poetry"],"id":17410,"author_id":"Siri+Hustvedt"},{"text":"Every sickness has an alien quality, a feeling of invasion and loss of control that is evident in the language we use about it.","author":"Siri Hustvedt","tags":["illness","language","sickness"],"id":19466,"author_id":"Siri+Hustvedt"},{"text":"I remember thinking how easy it is to speak in clichés, to steal a line from pulp fiction and let it fall. We can only hover around the inexpressible with our words anyway, and there is comfort in saying what we have heard before.","author":"Siri Hustvedt","tags":["cliché","language","love"],"id":28563,"author_id":"Siri+Hustvedt"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":102,"pages":11,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}