Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" Writing isn't a job so much as a compulsion. I've been writing since I was very young because for some strange reason, I must write, and also because when I write, I feel more alive and closer to the world than when I'm not writing. "

Related Quotes:

" 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

Physician

Interested

" 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. "

" Every mental state is also physical. "

" Sigmund Freud was very much a creature of his time. He did not 'invent' the unconscious. "

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

" Our great cultural error is to assume that 'truth' arrives only through reductive theories. "

" I knew I wanted to be a writer at 13. Before that, I told everyone I was going to be an artist. "

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

Siri Hustvedt

Invigorating

Forever

" The third-person or 'objective,' static, reductive models used in most science are important and yield significant results, but they have their limitations. "

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

" Henry Miller is a famous writer whose work has fallen out of fashion, but I strongly recommend that readers who don't know his work pick up a book and experience this writer's zealous, crazy, inventive, funny, sexy, often delirious prose. "

" The future is, of course, imaginary - an unreal place that I create from my expectations, which are made from my remembered experiences, especially repeated experiences. "

" I have suffered from migraines since childhood and have long been curious about my own aching head, my dizziness, my divine lifting feelings, my sparklers and black holes, and my single visual hallucination of a little pink man and a pink ox on the floor of my bedroom. "

" Neurobiological research has shown that in people with chronic PTSD, both stress hormone secretion and areas of the brain connected to memory function, such as the hippocampus, appear to be affected, although exactly how and why remains controversial. "

" 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

Reading

Myself

" 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. "

" I found myself fascinated by neuroscience, attended a monthly lecture on brain science at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, and was invited to become a member of a discussion group devoted to a new field: neuropsychoanalysis. "

" It's thought that about 96% of us have visual imagery, and there's a very tiny minority in the population, some of whom are normal, some of whom have brain lesions, who cannot produce visual imagery. "

" The idea that skiing might not be fun, might not be for everyone, had never occurred to me. Where I come from, the sport signified pleasure, nature, family happiness. "

" 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. "

" It's not as if I've been unlucky. My books have been published and reviewed. I haven't lived through terrible literary suffering! "

" 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. "

" As one of four daughters, I grew up with an imaginary brother - wondering what it would have been like if one of us had been a boy. There's no question that there was a phantom boy child in my imagination when I was young. "

" It is tempting to think of this form of insomnia, the inability to fall asleep, as a disease of agency and control: the inability to relinquish high self-reflexive consciousness for the vulnerable, ignorant regions of slumber in which we know not what we do. "

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

" 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. "

" We all live in a culture that is continually isolating feminine and masculine aspects, even when they're not related to people. "

" 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. "

" I am convinced that during bouts of insomnia, I have sometimes slept without knowing it. "

Siri Hustvedt

Knowing

Sometimes

" Far more women read fiction than men, and because of this, novels have become marginalised as serious texts. "

Siri Hustvedt

Serious

Men