Siri Quotes

Every sickness has an alien quality, a feeling of invasion and loss of control that is evident in the language we use about it.

There is no future without a past, because what is to be cannot be imagined except as a form of repetition.

Pain is always emotional. Fear and depression keep constant company with chronic hurting.

I will turn human anatomy into roses and stars and sea. I will dissect the beloveds body in metaphor.

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.

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.

Reading is a private pursuit; one that takes place behind closed doors.

I’m beginning to view democracy as the Siri of political systems. So much better in theory.

That night as I lay in bed, I thought of several things I could have said and mourned the fact that my wit usually bloomed late, peaking when it no longer mattered, during the solitary hours close to midnight.

Dreams are stories made by and for the dreamer, and each dreamer has his own folds to open and knots to untie.

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.

Why does it always have to be that way? Why do good men always have to sacrifice themselves for others? Because they believe that the rest of us are worth it.

When I spoke to her, I had the feeling that her thoughts had been nourished in wide-open spaces where talk was sparse and silence ruled.

Time is not outside us, but inside. Only we live with past, present, and future, and the present is too brief to experience anyway; it is retained afterward and then it is either codified or it slips into amnesia.

I've always thought of wholeness and integration as necessary myths. We're fragmented beings who cement ourselves together, but there are always cracks. Living with the cracks is part of being, well, reasonably healthy

Siry answered with one simple, shattering word. "Veelox.

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.

That is the strangeness of language: it crosses the boundaries of the body, is at once inside and outside, and it sometimes happens that we don't notice the threshold has been crossed.

Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.

Memory changes as a person matures.

Honesty can be a dirty gift.

We are all dying one by one. We all smell of mortality, and we can't wash it off.

He put his hand on his forehead and scoured the French department of his memory for a word. He knew it was in there. He'd put it in almost fifty years before and hadn't had cause to remove it. But for the life of him he couldn't find it.

Reading is perception as translation. The inert signs of an alphabet become living meanings in the mind.

Escribir es un modo de localizar mi hambre, y el hambre no es sino un vacío.

I remember thinking how easy it is to speak in clichés, to steal a line from pulp fiction and let it fall. We can only hover around the inexpressible with our words anyway, and there is comfort in saying what we have heard before.

Who has ever deserved anything they've been given? Love isn't about deserving,cara mia. It's about giving. And accepting. And sharing. The most worthy heart is also the most courageous.

I've always thought that love thrives on a certain kind of distance, that it requires an awed separateness to continue. Without that necessary remove, the physical minutiae of the other person grows ugly in its magnification.

This table is a pigeon trap. A dozen different forks and knives and spoons. Four different goblets. All of them just waiting to be knocked over or misapplied and mishandled. It’s a wonder anyone is ever tempted to eat.

A hero without faults is like an omelet without little bits of eggshell in it.

There are tragedies and there are comedies, aren’t there? And they are often more the same than different, rather like men and women, if you ask me. A comedy depends on stopping the story at exactly the right moment.

Great books are the ones that are urgent, life-changing, the ones that crack open the reader’s skull and heart.

Your past is not as important as your future. Did you know that? Can't change anything about what you've been, but you can change who you'll become.

Siri whispered an answer to my unasked question. "No, Merin, one is never really too old. At least not too old to want the warmth and closeness. You decide, my love. I will be content either way." I decided. Towards the dawn we slept.

The faculty of memory cannot be separated from the imagination. They go hand in hand. To one degree or another, we all invent our personal pasts. And for most of us those pasts are built from emotionally colored memories.

There's a phenomenology of being sick, one that depends on temperament, personal history, and the culture which we live in.

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.

Love is not some tool for manipulation. Love is a gift - love is from God. Love means everything.

Fiction is not an escape from the world either. Imaginary experience is also experience. O

Memory is essential to who we are, and memories can be both implicit and explicit - unconscious and conscious.

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.

People can't help what they feel. It's what they do that counts

The genius of women has always been easy to discount, suppress, or attribute to the nearest man. When

There was nothing fake or added about him. He was all himself.

Pero todos vivimos aquí, pensé para mis adentros, en esas historias imaginarias que nos relatamos sobre nuestras vidas.

Ukitaka kuwa mfanyabiashara mzuri wa madawa ya kulevya usitumie madawa ya kulevya. Siri ya mafanikio ya Kolonia Santita ni nidhamu na kitalifa.

Dreaming is another form of thinking, more concrete, more economical, more visual, and often more emotional than the thoughts of the day, but a thinking through of the day, nevertheless.

The recollections of an older man are different from those of a younger man. What seemed vital at forty may lose its significance at seventy. We manufacture stories, after all, from the fleeting sensory material that bombards us at every instant, a fragmented series of pictures, conversations, odors, and the touch of things and people. We delete most of it to live with some semblance of order, and the reshuffling of memory goes on until we die.

The woman’s brain has two hemispheres,” she slurred. “One for loving, one for hating. They can operate quite competently at the same time.

I suppose we are all products of our parents' joy and suffering. Their emotions are written into us, as much as the inscriptions made by their genes.

Widowers marry again because it makes their lives easier. Widows often don't, because it makes their lives harder. [p. 61]

But if it wasn't you, then who would I dream about?

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.

I’m left doing all the unskilled labor myself, which is exactly when you realize there’s nothing unskilled about labor.

Some of us are fated to live in a box from which there is only temporary release. We of the damned-up spirits, of the thwarted feelings, of the blocked hearts, and the pent-up thoughts, we who long to blast out, flood forth in a torrent of rage or joy or even madness, but there is nowhere for us to go, nowhere in the world because no one will have us as we are, and there is nothing to do except to embrace the secret pleasures of our sublimations, the arc of a sentence, the kiss of a rhyme, the image that forms on paper or canvas, the inner cantata, the cloistered embroidery, the dark and dreaming needlepoint from hell or heaven or purgatory or none of those three, but there must be some sound and fury from us, some clashing cymbals in the void.

Memory offers up its gifts only when jogged by something in the present. It isn't a storehouse of fixed images and words, but a dynamic associative network in the brain that is never quiet and is subject to revision each time we retrieve an old picture or old words.

Forgetting," I said, "is probably as much a part of life as remembering. We're all amnesiacs.

Libraries are sexual dream factories. The langour brings it on.

Honesty can be a dirty gift. It can muddy a sparkling stream of memories.

It was about sharing our lives. Building a dream. Starting a family. Together. It was about life being so much richer, so fuller, just because you were at my side.

Concentrate on the small things and do them well.

The man was heavy with life. So often it’s lightness that we admire. Those people who appear weightless and unburdened, who hover instead of walk, attract us with their defiance of ordinary gravity. Their carelessness mimics happiness, but Bill had none of that.

We project our feelings onto other people, but there is always a dynamic that creates those inventions. The fantasies are made between people, and the ideas about those people live inside us ... And, even after they die, they are still there. I am made of the dead.

Everyone had grown used to giving orders to the pleasant-voiced feminine robots. Alexa, Siri, Sophia, Sage, do this for me. A perky ‘okay’, and your wish was her command. They’d all been doing it for years before women started realising the men in their lives had been conditioned to do the same to them. And by then it was too late.

Nyhetene forgifter meg, og jeg merker jeg er sjeleglad for at det kommer en generasjon som er oppfostret på såkalt virkelighetsflukt. For de kommer til å redde ræva til oss alle. De vil ikke vippes av pinnen når problemet blir for stort. De har lest nok dystopier til å vite at regimer kan lyve. Nok fantasy til å vite at enkeltmennesker kan vinne over umulige odds. Nok sci-fi til å vite at framskritt også kan være et skritt tilbake. Og de vet at alle har lik verdi, uansett rase, legning eller religion. Og neste gang noen spør meg hvorfor fantasy er så populært skal jeg svare at det ikke spiller noen rolle, vi skal bare være glad for at det er det. Det er sånne som kommer til å overleve zombieapokalypsen, for å si det sånn.

We must all allow ourselves the fantasy of projection from time to time, a chance to clothe ourselves in the imaginary gowns and tails of what has never been and never will be. This gives some polish to our tarnished lives, and sometimes we may choose one dream over another, and in the choosing find some respite from ordinary sadness. After all, we, none of us, can ever untangle the knot of fictions that make up that wobbly thing we call a self.

Lots of women read fiction. Most men don't. Women read fiction written by women and by men. Most men don't. If a man opens a novel,. he likes to have a masculine name on the cover; it's reassuring somehow. You never know what might happen to that external genitalia if you immerse yourself in imaginary doings concocted by someone with the goods on the inside.

It seems to me that going backward sometimes means going forward.

Old places fire the internal weather of our pasts. The mild winds, aching calms, and hard storms of forgotten emotions return to us when we return to the spots where they happened.

Una mujer sentada junto a la ventana. Piensa / y mientras piensa, desespera / desespera por ser quien es / y no otra persona.

Love doesn't make you run away. Love makes you come back.

Worries about the power of a doctor's suggestions to influence and shape his patient's mind, whether they are made under hypnosis or not, are still with us.

There was a Lao proverb that called teachers the engineers of the soul

the spectator is the true vanishing point

Do you suppose it all means something? That we're being left clues? Perhaps. Then, no offense, but I fear they've badly overestimated us.

Gratitude” is about letting go of desired outcomes and fully embracing the privilege and process of pursuing goals and dreams. “Believe” refers to the confidence that arises naturally through this process, a self-trust that is the antithesis of the doubt-fueled fixation on goals and dreams expressed in Siri’s nightly fantasy of having the perfect race at the 2000 Olympics. Siri

When I was a child, Mama had the best voice of all the members of the church. She had loved to sing. Her words had soared like an angel's over the swells of the organ. In fact, I now suspected, her entire theology had been taken from the hymnal.

Imagine you are Siri Keeton: You wake in an agony of resurrection, gasping after a record-shattering bout of sleep apnea spanning one hundred forty days. You can feel your blood, syrupy with dobutamine and leuenkephalin, forcing its way through arteries shriveled by months on standby. The body inflates in painful increments: blood vessels dilate; flesh peels apart from flesh; ribs crack in your ears with sudden unaccustomed flexion. Your joints have seized up through disuse. You're a stick-man, frozen in some perverse rigor vitae. You'd scream if you had the breath. Vampires did this all the time, you remember. It was normal for them, it was their own unique take on resource conservation. They could have taught your kind a few things about restraint, if that absurd aversion to right-angles hadn't done them in at the dawn of civilization. Maybe they still can. They're back now, after all— raised from the grave with the voodoo of paleogenetics, stitched together from junk genes and fossil marrow steeped in the blood of sociopaths and high-functioning autistics. One of them commands this very mission. A handful of his genes live on in your own body so it too can rise from the dead, here at the edge of interstellar space. Nobody gets past Jupiter without becoming part vampire.

...a sense that even if every scrap of a life were saved, thrown into a giant mound and then carefully sifted to extract all possible meaning, it would not add up to a life.

I don't know why you are better and more beautiful than anybody else.

I often felt the girls' speech was interchangeable, without any individuality whatsoever, a kind of herd-speak they had all agreed upon.

But what they had achieved apart on the dance floors of the world was nothing compared to what they achieved together.

Maybe what God had done was give her a great gift. She'd come to this country helpless and friendless. She'd been given both friends and a family

It has taken me a very long time, a very long time to give myself permission to fly and breathe fire.

Only the unprotected self can feel joy.

Dipping a cockroach in ink and having it scamper around the page would have left more legible traces to the average reader.

But we all live there, I thought to myself, in the imaginary stories we tell ourselves about our lives.

Not telling is just as interesting as telling I have found. Why speech, that short verbal journey from inside to outside can be excrutiating under certain circumstances is fascinating.

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

Sina jinsi. Nguzo ya maisha yangu ni historia ya maisha yangu. Historia ya maisha yangu ni urithi wa watu waliojifunza kusema hapana kwa ndiyo nyingi – waliojitolea vitu vingi katika maisha yao kunifikisha hapa nilipo leo – walionifundisha falsafa ya kushindwa si hiari. Siri ya mafanikio yangu ni kujitahidi kwa kadiri ya uwezo wangu wote; au 'pushing the envelope' kwa lugha ya kigeni.

I have begun to wonder what actually happens in our brains when we return to half-remembered places. What is memory's perspective? Does the man revise the boy's view or is the imprint relatively static, a vestige of what was once intimately known?

Michael gave her the five-sentence rundown. "A fluid-borne disease made the dead come back to life. They like to attack the living. There are hundreds of them out there. The only way to kill them is to get them in the head with a weapon. There's a good chance we're all going to die." Vespertine was quiet for a moment before saying, with her usual coolness, "That will be engraved on a plaque someday, sir.I vote you Poet Laureate of the Undebuted Set.

He was one of those people in New York who was purported to "know everybody". "Knowing everybody" is a phrase that denotes not having many relations with people but having relations with a few people generally thought to be significant and powerful.

I had left small-town, rural life for good, and I had no intention of ever returning, not because I didn't like my home but because I had always known that I would leave. Leaving was part of my life romance, part of an idea I had about myself as a person destined for adventure; and as far as I could tell, adventure lay in the urban wilds of Manhattan, not in the farmland of Minnesota.

Shorn of intimacy and seen from a considerable distance, we are all comic characters, farcical buffoons who bumble through our lives, making fine messes as we go, but when you get close, the ridiculous quickly fades into the sordid or the tragic or the merely sad. [p. 73]

Det var like før daggry, men fremdeles mørkt ute. En flik av himmelen var synlig mellom klippene, langt over henne. Millioner av stjerner lå som støv. Flere stjerner enn Umpiri, mennesker, og ætlinger til sammen. Verden var så uendelig mye større enn skapningene den rommet.

This skin, this hair, all this outside stuff. It isn't me. It's just my package. It's like the wrapper around the sweet; it isn't the sweet itself. What we really are is all inside the package. All our feelings. All our good moods and bad moods. All our ideas, our cleverness, our love, that's what a person really is.

All right, here comes the philosophy. You can leave if you like but I suggest you stick it out. You don’t measure your own success against the size or volume of the effect you’re having. You gauge it from the difference you make to the subject you’re working on. Is leading an army that wins a war really that much more satisfying than teaching a four-year-old to ride a bicycle? At our age,” she said, “you go for the small things and you do them as well as you can.” In the back of the pony trap, squashed beside his two large boxes, Siri still felt Daeng’s lip prints on his cheek and heard her whisper, “Go for the small things and do them well.” It would be his new mantra. Forget the planet, save the garden.

The concept of the Trinity seems very esoteric and irrelevant in today's world, but it seems to me that only a faith embracing each person of the Trinity can save us from imbalance. While love without faith offers no hope, faith without love offers no mercy. We must have both faith and love or run the danger of discovering that, in the end, we have nothing at all.

Words accrue and lose meaning through a semantic mobility dependent on the community in which they thrive, and these meanings cannot be divorced from bodily sensation and emotion. Slang emerges among a circle of speakers. Irony requires double consciousness, reading one meaning and understanding another. Elegant prose involves a feeling for the rhythms and the music of sentences, a product of the sensual pleasure a writer takes in the sounds of words and the varying metric beats of sentences. Creative translation must take all this into account. If a meaning is lost in one sentence, it might be gained or added to the next one. Such considerations are not strictly logical. They do not involve a step-by-step plan but come from the translator’s felt understanding of the two languages involved. Rodney