True 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.


Siri Hustvedt

  Email Quote to Friends   Link to Quote   Create Short URL  Publish Text About This Quote   Share on Facebook, Twitter, and more
  See Recommended Quotes For You

Related

Ture stories can't be told forward, only backward. We invent them from the vantage point of an ever-...
SIRI HUSTVEDT
All stories told have been told before. We tell them to ourselves, as did all men who ever were. And...
BRANDON SANDERSON
Tell them stories. They need the truth you must tell them true stories, and everything will be well,...
PHILIP PULLMAN
And the stories we tell ourselves are not the only stories.
ERICA LORRAINE SCHEIDT
We are free falling backward through time, reincarnating ourselves from our past, reflecting the cha...
LORIN MORGAN-RICHARDS
I found that looking at the Israeli/Palestinian conflict from an outside vantage point was actually ...
JASON ALEXANDER
I'm from the South, so I tend to tell stories. That's how we express ourselves.
FAITH PRINCE
Time is an important ingredient for growth, but sometimes we pass through time and get better; at ot...
HENRY CLOUD
We tell ourselves stories,
JOAN DIDION
Be changless, but ever changing. changless in your goals of life, but ever changing in how you achie...
BRADLEY ERNEST RIDENOUR
Who are we but the stories we tell ourselves, about ourselves, and believe?
SCOTT TUROW
Our eventual fate will be the sum of the stories we told ourselves long enough.
CRYSTAL WOODS
We are the stories we tell ourselves.
SHEKHAR KAPUR
If the story-tellers could ha' got decency and good morals from true stories, who'd have troubled to...
THOMAS HARDY
How can we ever have peace when we cant even make peace with the things we cant control.
SYNECA DE JORMUNGAND
...What happens is of little significance compared with the stories we tell ourselves about what hap...
RABIH ALAMEDDINE
He would talk to them of stories and books, and explain to them how stories wanted to be told and bo...
JOHN CONNOLLY
In this universe, and this existence, where we live with this duality of whether we exist or not and...
SHEKHAR KAPUR
Life should never be viewed from the vantage point of achievements. It is total folly.
JOHN MELLENCAMP
I find it appalling from an ethical and moral vantage point that you can actually profit from steali...
ERIC EPSTEIN
On stage, everyone stays put; the vantage point is always the vantage point, and you have to play to...
TITUSS BURGESS
We’re constantly changing facts, rewriting history to make things easier, to make them fit in with...
S.J. WATSON
All the stories we tell ourselves are wrong.
J. ROBERT LENNON
We hunger to understand, so we invent myths about how we imagine the world is constructed - and they...
CARL SAGAN
It won't tell us exactly what's killing them, only whether they are making it from point A to point ...
BRODIE ANTIPA
Stories about lives remembered bring us backward while allowing us to move forward.
NINA SANKOVITCH
Life can only be understood looking backward. It must be lived forward.
ERIC ROTH
We carry our wounds and perhaps even worse, our capacity to wound, forward with us. If we learn not ...
PATRICIA HAMPL
I just do the best I can and write something interesting, to tell stories in an interesting way and ...
ANTHONY BOURDAIN
We tell ourselves stories in order to live,
JOAN DIDION
We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
JOAN DIDION
Not only had my brother disappeared, but--and bear with me here--a part of my very being had gone wi...
JOHN COREY WHALEY
Life is like a landscape. You live in the midst of it but can describe it only from the vantage poin...
CHARLES LINDBERGH
Far from looking backward we're going to be looking forward.
TOM SHANNON
I told them that we had done something very special, but that we were going to be a very different f...
JOE POWEL
But Viv, if I've learned anything at all in the last eight years of my life? It's that people just l...
KATIE COYLE
My Mom and Dad and brother have grown through the years into my closest friends, the people who tell...
SHAUNA NIEQUIST
But the truth is that no person ever understands another, from beginning to end of life, there is no...
ORSON SCOTT CARD
It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence to be ever in view,...
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
... from our vantage point it is now clear that the only thing the population had to fear was fear i...
BERNARD BECKETT
There are two kinds of people. One kind, you can just tell by looking at them at what point they con...
GAIL GODWIN
We tell our stories, especially as young people, in part because we want them to be true. We want li...
DANA FRANK
We have to learn from this, and we have to keep looking forward, not backward.
JENNY PFEIFFER
Dead people can be our heroes because they cant disappoint us later; they only improve over time, as...
VERONICA ROTH
The past remains integral to us all, individually and collectively. We must concede the ancients the...
DAVID LOWENTHAL
I cant tell you how pleased I am,
GRAEME SOUNESS
I was told stories, we were all told stories as kids in Nigeria. We had to tell stories that would k...
BEN OKRI
We all live with blinders on. They come with having a personal vantage point.
VICTORIA MORAN
It is said an eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent a sentence, to be ever in view, an...
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
It is only in our darkest hours that we may discover the true strength of the brilliant light within...
DOE ZANTAMATA
Never regret when something has gone wrong & don’t look backward. Only time to look backward is to...
DR ANIL KUMAR SINHA
We sell them an evening of films. We give them two options. I can present it and be the MC or they c...
KATHY DOTSON
It's going to be a pedestrian-oriented kind of village. From no vantage point will you be looking at...
BILL BULLOCK
Situations come to pass, they never come to stay. And when we allow them to pass and disappear into ...
GAIL PURSELL ELLIOTT
I wish I could anticipate some of the stories and lies that will be told. It's going to be great to ...
LARRY CONLEY
He was a good storyteller, and he wanted to tell the stories of the disabled from a personal point o...
GORDON DAVIDSON
Looking up and out, how can we not respect this ever-vigilant cognizance that distinguishes us: the ...
VANNA BONTA
Because technically actors are just public servants really. They just tell stories because people ne...
JAMES MCAVOY
You see, I was told stories, we were all told stories as kids in Nigeria. We had to tell stories tha...
BEN OKRI
An anthropologist will not excitedly report of a newly discovered tribe: 'They eat food! They br...
ELIEZER YUDKOWSKY
Who are we if not the stories we pass down? What happens when there's no one left to tell those stor...
CARRIE RYAN
Food is ever-changing and ever moving forward and getting more and more complex.
ALEXANDRA GUARNASCHELLI
It is really important to tell the stories so we can see how unique they can be ... bringing (storie...
ELEN SEMRAN
When angels speak of love they tell us it is only by loving that we enter an earthly paradise. They ...
BELL HOOKS
They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could ...
JEANETTE WINTERSON
From this vantage point, religious traditions can be reinterpreted in a manner that assists healing,...
LARRY GRAHAM
From that moment on we lived in true freedom, the freedom to point to someone else and "They told me...
MAX BROOKS
The Present Cant block out the past, Only a new past can block out the old
ROBERT JAMES
If only I could see myself from the same vantage point that I observe the world; I might judge my be...
RICHELLE E. GOODRICH
This is the problem of history. We cannot know that which we were not there to see and hear and expe...
YAA GYASI
We all need mantras, I guess - stories we tell ourselves to keep us going.
LAUREN OLIVER
Humans are kind of story-propagating creatures. If you think of how we spend our days, think of all ...
PATRICK ROTHFUSS
I said that I have finished telling my story, not that the story is finished. I said before that no ...
HERBERT ROSENDORFER
We must move forward with our first priority, the creation of an inspiring memorial to pay tribute t...
GEORGE PATAKI
Each of us has that right, that possibility, to invent ourselves daily. If a person does not invent ...
MAYA ANGELOU
destines them to eternity. He therefore, I believe, wants them to attend chiefly to two things, to e...
C.S. LEWIS
They told us our loved ones would be out of the mines and brought over here so we could see them and...
ANN MERIDETH
The past is fixed, the future doesn't exist, and the present is ever changing.
JIM GENOVESE
I think one of the primary themes in my work is the paradox of memory, at once fundamental to our se...
FLOYD SKLOOT
One of the main objectives is to make them successful from this point forward, whether they file or ...
BETTY PARKER
My father used to tell me stories before I fell asleep. When the children would gather, at a certain...
WOLE SOYINKA
We're so trendy we cant even escape ourselves.
KURT COBAIN
And it's a human need to be told stories. The more we're governed by idiots and have no cont...
ALAN RICKMAN
Stories nurture our connection to place and to each other. They show us where we have been and where...
SUSAN J. TWEIT
When we borrow trouble, and look forward into the future and see what storms are coming, and distres...
HENRY WARD BEECHER
I cant tell you how long its going to be, ... Cartilage scopes typically can be two weeks, sometimes...
MIKE HOLMGREN
Unfortunately, from what I can see from my vantage point as the U.S. Attorney here, illegal insider ...
PREET BHARARA
We all mythologize to some degree ourselves and probably embellish. I think some of that is the desi...
DAVID GRANN
Like the watermen who advance forward while they look backward.
MICHAEL EYQUEN DE MONTAIGNE
These are important stories to tell and should be told elsewhere, but not at America's memorial.
JACK LYNCH
It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we i...
JULIAN BARNES
Most of us do more than subsist. From the vantage point of our ancestors, we live lives of almost un...
GARY HAMEL
Its strange how people choose you and when you come to choose them ,they cant accept that
OMAR ASHRAF EZZELDIN
We are focusing on bringing the stories of these women to the world. These stories must be told if w...
EVE ENSLER
Nobody has changed their stories from what they told The Times.
EDDIE HILL
People come up to me and tell me how I changed their life and I've inspired them. And they tell ...
VALERIE BERTINELLI
The only true happiness comes from squandering ourselves for a purpose.
JOHN MASON BROWN
The only true happiness comes from squandering ourselves for a purpose.
WILLIAM COWPER
We told them that they picked the worst time of the year to play their worst half of the year. We to...
JEFF MARLOW
In the closing years of the nineteenth century, African-American historians began to look at their p...
JOHN HENRIK CLARKE

More Siri Hustvedt

American mass media culture, with its celebrities, shopping hysteria, sound bites, formulaic plots, ...
SIRI HUSTVEDT
There was a film class in my high school in Northfield, Minnesota, which was very unusual. I saw my ...
SIRI HUSTVEDT
I don't want the words to be naked the way they are in faxes or in the computer. I want them to be c...
SIRI HUSTVEDT
I have suffered from migraines since childhood and have long been curious about my own aching head, ...
SIRI HUSTVEDT
In August of 2002, I survived a car accident. Although I can still see the van speeding toward us, I...
SIRI HUSTVEDT
Each person does see the world in a different way. There is not a single, unifying, objective truth....
SIRI HUSTVEDT
Every sickness has an alien quality, a feeling of invasion and loss of control that is evident in th...
SIRI HUSTVEDT
When I don't get enough sleep, I am cranky, vulnerable to headaches, and my concentration is poo...
SIRI HUSTVEDT
Sleep resistance, bouts of insomnia, nightmares, night terrors, crawling into bed with parents in th...
SIRI HUSTVEDT
Children are not in a position to assess risk and safety; it must be done for them, and it must be d...
SIRI HUSTVEDT
It is tempting to think of this form of insomnia, the inability to fall asleep, as a disease of agen...
SIRI HUSTVEDT
Bedtime rituals for children ease the way to the elsewhere of slumber - teeth brushing and pajamas, ...
SIRI HUSTVEDT
I've always thought of wholeness and integration as necessary myths. We're fragmented beings who cem...
SIRI HUSTVEDT
If something's not working, it's wonderful to have a reader you can trust to say, 'Actua...
SIRI HUSTVEDT
Both depression and anxiety disorders, for example, are repeatedly described in the media as 'ch...
SIRI HUSTVEDT
Creativity has always depended on openness and flexibility, so let us hope for more of both in the f...
SIRI HUSTVEDT
I enjoy domestic life. Cooking gives me great pleasure, especially if I can chop vegetables slowly a...
SIRI HUSTVEDT
Every time the DSM prepares for a new edition, there are countless groups lobbying to get their part...
SIRI HUSTVEDT
The mind-brain is lived only from a first-person perspective, and it is a dynamic, plastic organ tha...
SIRI HUSTVEDT
When I was an impoverished graduate student, I would sometimes spend $20 or $30 on a T-shirt or acce...
SIRI HUSTVEDT
I am always suspicious of those who impose 'rules' on child rearing. Every child is differen...
SIRI HUSTVEDT
My feeling is, when you are writing an essay, you don't make anything up. This may be a very Pro...
SIRI HUSTVEDT
The history of fiction is about family - an inexhaustible subject for literature. We are creatures d...
SIRI HUSTVEDT
Rage has such focus. It can't go on forever, but it's invigorating.
SIRI HUSTVEDT
Intellectual curiosity about one's own illness is certainly born of a desire for mastery. If I c...
SIRI HUSTVEDT
Henry Miller is a famous writer whose work has fallen out of fashion, but I strongly recommend that ...
SIRI HUSTVEDT
I was 13 when I had my first bout of insomnia. My family was in Reykjavik, Iceland, for the summer, ...
SIRI HUSTVEDT
Not telling is just as interesting as telling I have found. Why speech, that short verbal journey fr...
SIRI HUSTVEDT
I am convinced that during bouts of insomnia, I have sometimes slept without knowing it.
SIRI HUSTVEDT
Ego, id, and superego are terms familiar to all, but for many years, Freud's psychoanalytic theo...
SIRI HUSTVEDT
I've come to understand that migraine is a part of the personality. I have migraine troughs. The...
SIRI HUSTVEDT
Far more women read fiction than men, and because of this, novels have become marginalised as seriou...
SIRI HUSTVEDT
With almost no exceptions, art by men is much more expensive than art by women. Even great women art...
SIRI HUSTVEDT
I watched 'Holiday' in college, and that was when I had my first fantasy of being Katharine ...
SIRI HUSTVEDT
That is the strangeness of language: it crosses the boundaries of the body, is at once inside and ou...
SIRI HUSTVEDT
I remember thinking how easy it is to speak in clichés, to steal a line from pulp fiction and let i...
SIRI HUSTVEDT
My greatest pleasure is spending time with my family: my husband and daughter, but also my mother, m...
SIRI HUSTVEDT
Although sometimes the morbid is also the transcendent, the transcendent cannot be reduced to the mo...
SIRI HUSTVEDT
I began to understand that ideologies necessarily push, pull, and tug at reality to make it fit the ...
SIRI HUSTVEDT
Writers are in control of editing processes - making a sentence better, cutting out a paragraph. But...
SIRI HUSTVEDT
It's not as if I've been unlucky. My books have been published and reviewed. I haven't l...
SIRI HUSTVEDT
I found myself fascinated by neuroscience, attended a monthly lecture on brain science at the New Yo...
SIRI HUSTVEDT
When I taught writing classes to psychiatric patients, I met people whose stories of manic highs and...
SIRI HUSTVEDT
Perception plays a vital role in the diagnosis of bipolar illness. Symptoms are perceived through th...
SIRI HUSTVEDT
Vi läser av varandra genom ögonen, och anatomiskt är ögonen en förlängning av hjärnan. När v...
SIRI HUSTVEDT
I've often thought that one of us is what we imagine, that each of us normalizes the terrible strang...
SIRI HUSTVEDT
When I say my wound became political in the years that followed, I don't mean that my involvement in...
SIRI HUSTVEDT
El tiempo no es algo externo a nosotros, vive en nuestro interior. Sólo nosotros vivimos el pasado,...
SIRI HUSTVEDT
Escribir es un modo de localizar mi hambre, y el hambre no es sino un vacío.
SIRI HUSTVEDT
Pero todos vivimos aquí, pensé para mis adentros, en esas historias imaginarias que nos relatamos ...
SIRI HUSTVEDT
It's hard to penetrate characters who are very cut off and lack empathy and to do it with sympat...
SIRI HUSTVEDT
None of us is immune to suggestion. We are social beings and live in a social world.
SIRI HUSTVEDT
We chart delusions through collective agreement.
SIRI HUSTVEDT
I had read my way not to knowledge but into an inscrutable oblivion.
SIRI HUSTVEDT
Dreaming is another form of thinking, more concrete, more economical, more visual, and often more em...
SIRI HUSTVEDT
Dreams are stories made by and for the dreamer, and each dreamer has his own folds to open and knots...
SIRI HUSTVEDT
There is no reason we should expect young children to enter the nocturnal darkness of sleep and drea...
SIRI HUSTVEDT
Most of us accept that although we may believe our dreams to be real events, upon waking, we can tel...
SIRI HUSTVEDT
Memory offers up its gifts only when jogged by something in the present. It isn't a storehouse of fi...
SIRI HUSTVEDT
Ture stories can't be told forward, only backward. We invent them from the vantage point of an ever-...
SIRI HUSTVEDT
The faculty of memory cannot be separated from the imagination. They go hand in hand. To one degree ...
SIRI HUSTVEDT
Despite the fact that he fathered ten children, Dickens, the write, never gave up his position as a ...
SIRI HUSTVEDT
Worries about the power of a doctor's suggestions to influence and shape his patient's mind, whether...
SIRI HUSTVEDT
I had left small-town, rural life for good, and I had no intention of ever returning, not because I ...
SIRI HUSTVEDT
All I can say is that every time I'm with him, she's there. She walks through every game I play with...
SIRI HUSTVEDT
Minusta tuntuu hyvältä nähdä luuni. Pidän siitä että näen ja tunnen ne. Kun minun ja luitten...
SIRI HUSTVEDT
I was afraid of it, because I liked it. It excited me.
SIRI HUSTVEDT
He was one of those people in New York who was purported to "know everybody". "Knowing everybody" is...
SIRI HUSTVEDT
When I spoke to her, I had the feeling that her thoughts had been nourished in wide-open spaces wher...
SIRI HUSTVEDT
Six months isn't such a long time. That's how long it's been since I came to see you in May, but the...
SIRI HUSTVEDT
The New or Future Eve is emptied of all inner life and turned into a shell. The bitter irony in this...
ASTI HUSTVEDT
Like symbolism, decadence puts forth the idea that the function of literature is to evoke impression...
ASTI HUSTVEDT
The photograph, then, becomes a representation of a representation of a disease that represents. In ...
ASTI HUSTVEDT
Your past is not as important as your future. Did you know that? Can't change anything about what yo...
SIRI MITCHELL
PCS has been a unique school from the very beginning.
DIANE SIRI
The Santa Cruz County Office of Education, in partnership with the Local Childcare Planning Council ...
DIANE SIRI
Now that I've made this decision, I'll look for ways to stay involved in education.
DIANE SIRI
I've accomplished most of the things I set out to do. It just seems like the right time to make a tr...
DIANE SIRI
This table is a pigeon trap. A dozen different forks and knives and spoons. Four different goblets. ...
SIRI MITCHELL
There is no liberation without labor... and there is no freedom which is free.
THE SIRI SINGH SAHIB