Like countless first-year medical students, immersed in the symptoms of one disease after another, I am alert to the tingles and pangs, the throbs and quivers of my mortal body, each one of which is potentially a sign of the end.
Siri HustvedtReading is perception as translation. The inert signs of an alphabet become living meanings in the mind.
Siri HustvedtThe fictive is an emormous territory it turns out, its boundaries vague, and there is little certainty about where it begins and ends.
Siri HustvedtThe recollections of an older man are different from those of a younger man. What seemed vital at forty may lose its significance at seventy. We manufacture stories, after all, from the fleeting sensory material that bombards us at every instant, a fragmented series of pictures, conversations, odors, and the touch of things and people. We delete most of it to live with some semblance of order, and the reshuffling of memory goes on until we die.
Siri Hustvedt