Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
There's a phenomenology of being sick, one that depends on temperament, personal history, and the culture which we live in.
Every sickness has an alien quality, a feeling of invasion and loss of control that is evident in the language we use about it.
We all live in a culture that is continually isolating feminine and masculine aspects, even when they're not related to people.
People who grow up with two or more languages understand that each can express certain aspects of reality better than the other.
If something's not working, it's wonderful to have a reader you can trust to say, 'Actually, you've gone off the deep end here'.
It's not as if I've been unlucky. My books have been published and reviewed. I haven't lived through terrible literary suffering!
Hysteria is something that I've been interested for a very long time. I thought I might have it, but it seems that it's unlikely.
I am not a physician, but I am deeply interested in diagnostic categories and have read extensively in the history of the subject.
Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.
I was 13 when I had my first bout of insomnia. My family was in Reykjavik, Iceland, for the summer, and day never really became night.
The fictive is an emormous territory it turns out, its boundaries vague, and there is little certainty about where it begins and ends.
My greatest pleasure is spending time with my family: my husband and daughter, but also my mother, my three sisters, and their families.
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.
A book is a collaboration between the one who reads and what is read and, at its best, that coming together is a love story like any other.
Many writers over the centuries simply do not have the reputations they deserve because they were female, and that is an act of suppression.
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.
The mind-brain is lived only from a first-person perspective, and it is a dynamic, plastic organ that changes in relation to the environment.
The brain is an immensely complex organ, and many mysteries remain. Exactly how brain and mind or soma and psyche are related is one of them.
I have found that all of my memories seem to need a place and that a good part of what we think of as explicit memory has to do with location.
I saw Joseph Cornell's lyrical work for the first time at the Museum of Modern Art in the late seventies and have internalized many of his boxes.
My parents were gigantic influences on me. I had a deep hunger to impress my father, who was a professor and an intellectual. I wanted his approval.
There is a difference between using a made-up name and using real people as pseudonyms. People are not costumes you can wear. They are flesh and blood.
It's hard to penetrate characters who are very cut off and lack empathy and to do it with sympathy. It's so easy to make a damaged character repugnant.
It is fascinating to me that when the lists of the great writers are trotted out year after year, you often find lists without a single woman mentioned.
Flashbacks rarely involve language. Mine certainly didn't. They were visual, motor, and sensory, and they took place in a relentless, horrifying present.
Ture stories can't be told forward, only backward. We invent them from the vantage point of an ever-changing present and tell ourselves how they unfolded.
Sigmund Freud makes people irritable. Whenever someone mentions Freud, say, at a dinner party, I see eyes roll and listen to the nasty remarks that follow.
I have a longstanding fascination with visual art. I do, in fact, draw as well, as I did in 'The Summer without Men.' I also write essays about visual art.
The third-person or 'objective,' static, reductive models used in most science are important and yield significant results, but they have their limitations.
Years ago, when I was in Siena for the first time, I saw the works of Duccio, whose deeply emotional painting from the thirteenth century has never left me.
American mass media culture, with its celebrities, shopping hysteria, sound bites, formulaic plots, received ideas, and nauseating repetitions, depresses me.
All human states are organic brain states - happiness, sadness, fear, lust, dreaming, doing math problems and writing novels - and our brains are not static.
Scientists have a tendency to believe in absolutes, in studies and the repeating of them. Psychoanalysis is firmly based in subjective accounts. We need both.
I've often thought that one of us is what we imagine, that each of us normalizes the terrible strangeness of inner life with a variety of convenient fictions.
In August of 2002, I survived a car accident. Although I can still see the van speeding toward us, I cannot bring to mind the crash itself - only its aftermath.
The truth is that personality inevitably bleeds into all forms of our intellectual life. We all extrapolate from our own lives in order to understand the world.
Most of us accept that although we may believe our dreams to be real events, upon waking, we can tell the difference between nocturnal hallucinations and reality.
After years of having immersed myself in science, I do think that if you master several different ways of thinking, it makes your own thought processes more agile.
Even in fiction, I feel rigorous honesty applies. It doesn't apply to facts; it applies to what I think of as not telling emotional lies, which is a funny business.
I watched 'Holiday' in college, and that was when I had my first fantasy of being Katharine Hepburn, standing at the top of the staircase in a huge Hollywood mansion.
The idea that skiing might not be fun, might not be for everyone, had never occurred to me. Where I come from, the sport signified pleasure, nature, family happiness.
Nobody knows what either sleep or waking consciousness is, even though these two have long been seen as the two sides of being: part of life's unvarying diurnal rhythm.
The future is, of course, imaginary - an unreal place that I create from my expectations, which are made from my remembered experiences, especially repeated experiences.
I enjoy domestic life. Cooking gives me great pleasure, especially if I can chop vegetables slowly and think about what I'm doing and dream a little about this and that.
Intellectual curiosity about one's own illness is certainly born of a desire for mastery. If I couldn't cure myself, perhaps I could at least begin to understand myself.
If I have open time, and I'm in Manhattan, I'll just walk to wherever I'm going, even if I could get there faster on the subway. I just love walking the streets of New York.
I've come to understand that migraine is a part of the personality. I have migraine troughs. These often follow high productivity. I have a hypo-manic phase, then I'll crash.
Being a mother is complicated because its not just a paternal culture making demands on you; its those internal demands and expectations that women have and are self-generated.
Being a mother is complicated because it's not just a paternal culture making demands on you; it's those internal demands and expectations that women have and are self-generated.
Women really are not supposed to be imaginative. That creativity of this kind is supposed to belong to men. You know, because women make babies. I find the double standards shocking.