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.
A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty—and, by which definition, a philosopher—dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him; in his two-fold security.
Without justice and love, peace will always be a great illusion.
Our little solos are a note in an immense chorus vibrating grandly through the universe, a chorus which accepts and harmonizes the whir of the cricket and the long drum-roll of the stars.
Saying that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say.
And that is the secret of this world. If you remove love of dunya from your heart, the dunya is yours for the taking. You can have the dunya because it's in your hand and not in your heart
The U.S. should worry about the effects of its polices on the rest of the world. We would like to live in a world where countries take into account the effect of their policies on other countries and do what is right, broadly, rather than what is just right given the circumstances of that country.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.