01UndatedImmigration inevitably involves error and revision. What I imagined it would be, it's not. For better or worse, some mistake is unavoidable.Siri Hustvedt / quote ↗
02UndatedNo doubt I would have felt reverent in less lovely places, because I imagined a past I connected to myself.Siri Hustvedt / quote ↗
03UndatedI imagined Stephen's companion was a beautiful woman. Her form and coloring changed with my moving thoughts, but the idea that she existed remained to nag at me, and even though she was only a spook of my jealousy, I couldn't stop the surge of fantasies about her and Stephen. By the time I left the library, I had invented several elaborate plots involving the two of them.Siri Hustvedt / quote ↗
04UndatedTure stories can't be told forward, only backward. We invent them from the vantage point of an ever-changing present and tell ourselves how they unfolded.Siri Hustvedt / quote ↗
05UndatedMemory is essential to who we are, and memories can be both implicit and explicit - unconscious and conscious.Siri Hustvedt / quote ↗
06UndatedMemory 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 / quote ↗
08UndatedInfancy is irretrievable. Its memories live underground. To what extent they return by stealth or are triggered by various catalysts remains an ongoing question.Siri Hustvedt / quote ↗
09UndatedWhat she remembered is undoubtedly something so radically different from the image I gave to her memory that the two may be incompatible.Siri Hustvedt / quote ↗
10UndatedMy memory of the school building itself, its rooms and lockers, blackboards, and hallways, bring on a heavy, oppressive feeling. Whether I was more unhappy in school than any of my friends I don't know. I never would have said I didn't like school, and there are moments I distinctly remember enjoying, but these truths don't alter my memory of that place.Siri Hustvedt / quote ↗
11UndatedIt can only be that places left behind often become emotionally simplified - that they sound a single note of pain or pleasure, which means that they are never what they were.Siri Hustvedt / quote ↗
12UndatedIt may be that I link every library to that first one - to my early childhood experience of drawing on the floor near my father's desk. A library is of course a real place, but it is also an unreal one. What happens there is mostly silent. I think I've always liked the whispering aspect of libraries, the hushing librarians and my feeling of solitude among many.Siri Hustvedt / quote ↗
13UndatedDo you know that I can't remember her face? Try as I may, it will not be conjured. I can tell you what she looked like; I can recite a description of her features, part by part, but I cannot evoke the whole face.''Don't you have a photograph?''Photographs!' He spat out the word. 'I'm talking about true recollection - seeing the face.Siri Hustvedt / quote ↗
14UndatedIn this early memory he looks different from the way I would remember him later.Siri Hustvedt / quote ↗
15UndatedTrue stories can't be told forward, only backward. We invent them from the vantage point of an ever-changing present and tell ourselves how they unfolded.Siri Hustvedt / quote ↗
16UndatedIt appears that time has turned that young woman, who imagined herself a romantic heroine, into something of a comic character, but I remain fond of her. We are relatives, after all.Siri Hustvedt / quote ↗
17UndatedOld places fire the internal weather of our pasts. The mild winds, aching calms, and hard storms of forgotten emotions return to us when we return to the spots where they happened.Siri Hustvedt / quote ↗
19UndatedI know, but he must have felt it that way, that evil was an emptiness, a lack of something, not a presence.'He turned his head fast and looked at me. 'That's what desire is, isn't it? The lack of something.Siri Hustvedt / quote ↗
22UndatedThe truth is that personality inevitably bleeds into all forms of our intellectual life. We all extrapolate from our own lives in order to understand the world.Siri Hustvedt / quote ↗
24UndatedEvery sickness has an alien quality, a feeling of invasion and loss of control that is evident in the language we use about it.Siri Hustvedt / quote ↗
