We chart delusions through collective agreement.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that our shared beliefs can often be based on illusions that we collectively accept as truth.
Siri Hustvedt's quote emphasizes the idea that the realities we perceive are often shaped by societal consensus rather than objective truth. It reflects on how individuals can collectively agree on falsehoods or delusions, which then form the basis of their understanding and interpretation of the world around them. This concept invites us to question the validity of our shared beliefs and consider the impact of social dynamics on our perceptions.
In practice
During a discussion about social media's impact on public opinion, one might reference this quote to highlight how shared beliefs can distort reality.
Perception plays a vital role in the diagnosis of bipolar illness. Symptoms are perceived through the categories of psychiatric medicine at a given moment in history, categories which are continually shifting and being named or renamed.
Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.
All human states are organic brain states - happiness, sadness, fear, lust, dreaming, doing math problems and writing novels - and our brains are not static.
I don't want the words to be naked the way they are in faxes or in the computer. I want them to be covered by an envelope that you have to rip open in order to get at. I want there to be a waiting time -a pause between the writing and the reading. I want us to be careful about what we say to each other. I want the miles between us to be real and long. This will be our law -that we write our dailiness and our suffering very, very carefully.
under our love making I felt a bleakness that couldnt be dispelled. The sadness was in both of us, and I think we pitied ourselves that night, as if we were other people looking down on the couple who lay together on the bed
People who grow up with two or more languages understand that each can express certain aspects of reality better than the other.
Sometimes... sometimes I think the Asylum is a head. We're inside a huge head that dreams us all into being. Perhaps it's your head, Batman. Arkham is a looking glass... and we are you.
Pleasure is the greatest incentive to evil.
Scopes isn’t on trial; civilization is on trial.
Sympathy is what you have for someone after they die, pity you have for someone when they don't have a date to the biggest dance of the year. Empathy is what I do to you when you judge me. Envy is having pity on yourself. Can you discern the rest for yourself?
A few years ago it dawned on me that everybody past a certain age ... pretty much constantly dreams of being able to escape from their lives. They don't want to be who they are any more. They want out. This list includes Thurston Howell the Third, Ann-Margret, the cat members of Rent, Václav Havel, space shuttle astronauts and Snuffleupagus. It's universal.
A religious person is devout in the sense that he has no doubt about the significance of those superpersonal objects and goals which neither require nor are capable of rational foundation
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