The Sorrows of an American
Siri Hustvedt
Top 10 Best Quotes
“I've always thought of wholeness and integration as necessary myths. We're fragmented beings who cement ourselves together, but there are always cracks. Living with the cracks is part of being, well, reasonably healthy”
“That is the strangeness of language: it crosses the boundaries of the body, is at once inside and outside, and it sometimes happens that we don't notice the threshold has been crossed.”
“We read each other through our eyes, and anatomically they are an extension of our brains. When we catch someone's eye, we look into a mind.”
“Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.”
“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 subject to revision each time we retrieve an old picture or old words.”
“I've often thought that one of us is what we imagine, that each of us normalizes the terrible strangeness of inner life with a variety of convenient fictions.”
“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.”
“I've come to think of consciousness as a continuum of states, from fully awake cogitation to daydreaming to the altered consciousness of hallucinations and dreams. Still, interpreting dreams can only take place when we're awake. I believe meaning is what the mind makes and wants. It's essential to perception and to consciousness in all its forms. But the important meanings of psychotherapy are subjective. There's a lot of research that confirms that drem content reflects the dreamer's emotional conflicts.”
“...the distance needed for humor is always missing from dreams.”
“The second anniversary opened an internal crack in Sonia, a fissure through which she released the explosive feeling that had horrified her for two years. The conflagration that had burned so many, that had pushed people into the open air, onto the ledges from which they jumped, some of them on fire, had left its unspeakable images inside my niece. ...Sonia didn't want a world in which buildings fell down and wars were fought for no reason.”
Except where otherwise noted, all rights reserved to the author(s) of this book (mentioned above). The content of this page serves solely as promotional material for the aforementioned book. If you enjoyed these quotes, you can support the author(s) by acquiring the full book from Amazon.
Book Keywords:
dreams, past, memory, 9-11, healthy, imagination, returning-home, image, old-places, mind, humor, present, mental-health, inner-life, brain, language, past-and-present, internal-weather, siri-hustvedt, words, the-sorrows-of-an-american, reading
