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Quote by Siri Hustvedt

“We bring our life stories, our prejudices, our grudges, our expectations, and our limitations with us to books….Openness to a book is vital, and openness is simply a willingness to be changed by what we read. This is not as easy as it sounds. Many people read to solidify their own views.”

Quote by Siri Hustvedt

Work

Living, Thinking, Looking: Essays

This book is a compilation of thoughtful essays that delve into the complexities of human experience, examining the nature of life, thought, and observation. more

Author

Siri Hustvedt
Siri Hustvedt

Siri Hustvedt is an American novelist born on February 19, 1955. Her works are known for their deep psychological insights and exploration of female experiences. Hustvedt's novels often blend philosophy, literature, and psychology, showcasing complex characters and inner worlds. more

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“Reading then is writing, in an endless movement of giving and receiving: each reading reinscribes something of a text; each reading reconstitutes the web it tries to decipher, but by adding another web. One must read in a text not only that which is visible and present but also the nontext of the text, the parentheses, the silences.”

“In other words, so far as many reputable studies are concerned, television viewing does not significantly increase learning, is inferior to and less likely than print to cultivate higher-order, inferential thinking.”

“Part of reading is accretive, language building up in the mind to form the book we draw from the pages before us and subsequently carry within us. But another part of reading...lives only in the present, is a transient experience that exists only in the now and now as we do it. Love of that impossible-to-hold experience is why readers also tend to be habitual rereaders. We read in part to find out what happens, but even more so to be part, over and over again, and never twice in exactly the same way, of its happening.”

“...reading is like dreaming, and subject to some of the same suspicions. Are dreams (are books) messages from parts of ourselves we can't otherwise bear to know? Is dreaming (is reading) a sacred experience or a kind of psychic housekeeping? Perhaps most especially, are dreams (are books) an alternative to reality or an aspect of it? How do we know the difference between our real life and our dreaming (reading) life? What happens when the line gets blurred?”

“My attachment to books is sensual as well as intellectual. A friend of mine once broke my concentration to remark that I will caress a book as I read along. I hadn't noticed but it's true: my hands move constantly over the pages. I love to hold them, feel them. I love the way books smell. I will fold a paperback in two and break the spine. I will bend the spine of a hardback, felling the turned page rend just enough until it rest loosely in position.”