“Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.”
More from Siri Hustvedt on Philosophy
“Distortion is part of desire. We always change the things we want.”
“Correlation is not cause, it is just a 'music of chance'.”
“Accumulated experience always alters perception of the past.”
“If not violently overthrown, expectation can have a power in itself, can invest a place with what literally isn't there.”
“Insanity is a state of profound self-absorption.”
“Each person does see the world in a different way. There is not a single, unifying, objective truth. We're all limited by our perspective.”
“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.”
“We chart delusions through collective agreement.”
“No doubt I would have felt reverent in less lovely places, because I imagined a past I connected to myself.”
“Memory changes as a person matures.”
Others on Philosophy
Ludwig Wittgenstein
22 quotes“The logic of the world is prior to all truth and falsehood.”
Christopher Hitchens
22 quotes“How much vanity must be concealed – not too effectively at that – in order to pretend that one is the personal object of...”
Nietzsche
22 quotes“One does not hate as long as one has a low esteem of someone, but only when one esteems him as an equal or a superior.”
Carl Jung
21 quotes“The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.”
Immanuel Kant
20 quotes“Morality is not the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.”
Heraclitus
19 quotes“All things flow nothing abides.”
H. L. Mencken
17 quotes“We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.”
C.S. Lewis
15 quotes“[Consciousness] is either inexplicable illusion, or else revelation.”
Fyodor Dostoevsky
14 quotes“Consciousness is man's greatest misfortune, still I know that man loves it and will not exchange it for any satisfaction...”
Samuel Beckett
14 quotes“The end is in the beginning and yet you go on.”
Napoleon
14 quotes“Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide.”
Isaac Asimov
13 quotes“Society is much more easily soothed than one's own conscience.”