Novelists embody plural selves all the time. What are characters, after all, if not other selves?
Interpretation
Novelists create diverse characters that represent different aspects of human identity.
In this quote, Siri Hustvedt emphasizes that novelists have the unique ability to explore and express various facets of human existence through their characters. Each character can be seen as a reflection of the authorβs own experiences, thoughts, and emotions, embodying different perspectives and identities in the narrative.
In practice
In a writing workshop, this quote can inspire participants to delve deeper into character development.
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.
I can explain all the poems that were ever invented - and a good many that haven't been invented just yet.
There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st But in his motion like an angel sings.
O why do I ever let anyone read what I write! Every time I have to go through a breakfast with a letter of criticism I swear I will write for my own praise or blame in future. It is a misery.
There is something that always will be true about painting and sculpture - that in order to really get it, you have to show up. That is something that is both sad and kind of beautiful about it. It remains analog. It remains special and irreducible.
A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament.
The artist and the photographer seek the mysteries and the adventure of experience in nature.
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