“ I 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 some… Siri Hustvedt
“ Old 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
“ It 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
“ True 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
“ Do 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… Siri Hustvedt
“ It 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 on… Siri Hustvedt
“ It 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
“ My 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 kno… Siri Hustvedt
“ What she remembered is undoubtedly something so radically different from the image I gave to her memory that the two may be incompatible. Siri Hustvedt
“ Infancy 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
“ 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 subj… Siri Hustvedt
“ Memory is essential to who we are, and memories can be both implicit and explicit - unconscious and conscious. Siri Hustvedt
“ Ture 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
“ I 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 o… Siri Hustvedt
“ No doubt I would have felt reverent in less lovely places, because I imagined a past I connected to myself. Siri Hustvedt
“ Immigration inevitably involves error and revision. What I imagined it would be, it's not. For better or worse, some mistake is unavoidable. Siri Hustvedt
“ 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 s… Siri Hustvedt
