Lidia Yuknavitch Quotes & Sayings

Dead infants don't get urns unless you pay for them - and then they stuff crap in besides just ashes to cover the smallness. — Lidia Yuknavitch

Africa will become an out-of-reach commodity instead of the expendable refuse heap we've treated her as. — Lidia Yuknavitch

Fiction and poetry expose intimate things from a person's life every bit as much as memoir does, and sometimes more. I don't quite see or live the distinction you are making about the forms. — Lidia Yuknavitch

Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, lemme tell you. Those are big years. Everybody always thinks of it as a time of adolescence - just getting through to the real part of your life - but it's more than that. Sometimes your whole life happens in those years, and the rest of your life it's just the same story playing out with different characters. I could die tomorrow and have lived the main ups and downs of life. Pain. Loss. Love. And what you all so fondly refer to as wisdom. Wanna know the difference between adult wisdom and young adult wisdom? You have the ability to look back at your past and interpret it. I have the ability to look at my present and live it with my whole body. — Lidia Yuknavitch

When a female character sets herself on fire in an effort to interrupt her culture's violent abuse of disenfranchised people, or physically tortures and punishes her guardian rapist, or picks up a gun and fights back in ways that make her not pretty, or aggressively rejects her role as the object of desire, or even when she waddles off into the woods to squat and have a baby without the safety and expertise of hospitals and doctors, these are the kinds of violences and stories we can learn from. — Lidia Yuknavitch

Through the doorway to choice and hope were the saddest girls I have ever met. Not because someone beat them or because someone molested them or because they were poor or pregnant or even because they put needles in their arms or pills in their mouths or weed in their lungs or alcohol down their ever-constricting throats. They were the saddest girls I have ever met because every one of them had it in her to lose a shot at a self and become her mother. — Lidia Yuknavitch

Too, some of my teachers helped me to navigate those books, showed me the maps and paths and secret decoder rings - people like Linda Kintz and Forest Pyle and Mary Wood and Diana Abu Jaber. They didn't treat me like a messy writer girl in combat boots who had infiltrated the smart people room. They treated me like I deserved to be there, potty mouth and all, they helped make a space for me to rage and ride my own intellect. That's why I'm saying their names out loud. — Lidia Yuknavitch

I just want my stories to be mine. — Lidia Yuknavitch

America, land of coupling, land of sanctioned marriage and two-person twined knots, land of tireless good-citizen living, land of the happy family, land of the free and the brave and the locked imagination, land of ignorant homeowner masses lined up in twos. — Lidia Yuknavitch

Poetry, for example, goes so deeply into the space between corporeal affect and deep emotion (even primal in some cases) that, as Emily Dickinson said, it can blow the top of your head off. Poetic language is sometimes misunderstood as "abstract" when in reality, it's precise - precisely the language of emotions and the body. — Lidia Yuknavitch

The convention of the coming-of-age story and the love story were literally abandoned - because they had to be - and a new kind of coming-of-age and love story emerged that required a different kind of telling the story. — Lidia Yuknavitch

She is at a crossroads: a child's violent will to survive lodged in her chest where her heart should be, but an utter indifference along with it. — Lidia Yuknavitch

France will take on a militant tone, leaving its beautiful cultural tower to chase power after all these years. — Lidia Yuknavitch

Even when our lives went to shit, they were still just our lives. Our puny, overdramatic, American lives. And where we are from - our so-called country, defined by the smell of a well-made latte, the silent hum of an all-consuming war machine, and the televised face of Oprah - are we for something? Against something? — Lidia Yuknavitch

I didn't know yet how wanting to die could be a bloodsong in your body that lives with you your whole life. I didn't know then how deeply my mother's song had swum into my sister and into me. I didn't know that something like wanting to die could take form in one daughter as the ability to quietly surrender, and in the other as the ability to drive into death head-on. I didn't know we were our mother's daughters after all. — Lidia Yuknavitch

This is something I know: damaged women? We don't think we deserve kindness. IN fact, when kindness happens to us, we go a little berserk. It's threatening. Deeply. Because if I have to admit how profoundly I need kindness? I have to admit that I hid the me who deserves it down in a sadness well. — Lidia Yuknavitch

These words "accessible" and "emotionally available" get thrown at us from agents and editors and publishers - or the reverse - if it's not all goo-ey and sentimental we're told it's "cold" or "uncaring" or "emotionally vacant." In other words, responses to women's writing in particular continue to be "gendered." — Lidia Yuknavitch

Unlike those in power here on CIEL, reproduction wasn't what we mourned. We mourned the carnal. Societies may be organized around procreation, but individuals are animals. I think we craved her sexuality -- her sexual reality. The fact of her body. Not particularly female, leaning toward male, an exquisite androgyny. Her head of thick black hair a mighty emblem of desire. — Lidia Yuknavitch

The best memoirs - like This Boy's Life, or Crazy Brave [by Joy Harjo], for instance - bring you through a private river of storytelling that joins a major ocean of human struggle and joy. The act of enunciation - the forms and strategies of storytelling - are every bit as literarily serious as they are in poetry or other prose forms. — Lidia Yuknavitch

Out of the sad sack of sad shit that was my life, I made a wordhouse. — Lidia Yuknavitch

I love the walking contradiction of the body. I want to make corporeal characters, corporeal writing, I want to bring the intensities and contradictions and beauty and violence and stench and desire and astonishing physicality of the body back into literature. — Lidia Yuknavitch

I am a woman who talks to herself and lies. — Lidia Yuknavitch

Words from my whole body, my entire life, or the lives of women and girls whose stories got stuck in their throats came gushing out. — Lidia Yuknavitch

Because in loving his darkness I found my own. — Lidia Yuknavitch

Only the violent acts of men "count" toward something besides evil in a patriarchy. It is the male story of violence that is sanctioned both socially and aesthetically. The male hero and acts of heroism require violence. Everyone is okey dokey with that. We are only beginning to see that constricting set of truths open up a little. — Lidia Yuknavitch

Though I consider The Chronology of Water to be an anti-memoir for very precise reasons, it is an art form, and thus as open to "critique" as any other art form. Memoir has a form, formal strategies, issues of composition and craft, style, structure, all the elements of fiction or nonfiction or painting or music or what have you. — Lidia Yuknavitch

However, narrating what you remember, telling it to someone, does something else. The more a person recalls a memory, the more they change it. Each time they put it into language, it shifts. The more you describe a memory, the more likely it is that you are making a story that fits your life, resolves the past, creates a fiction you can live with. It's what writers do. Once you open your mouth, you are moving away from the truth of things. According to neuroscience. The safest memories are locked in the brains of people who can't remember. Their memories remain the closest replica of actual events. Underwater. Forever. — Lidia Yuknavitch

remember how they tracked down that green-eyed Afghan girl? And she's now a leather-faced crone? Because her life went from misery and shit to more monotonous and meaningless misery and shit, while her famous photo went 'round and 'round the world making that McCurry guy famous? I say we do it. — Lidia Yuknavitch

Everybody uses everybody until we're all just a bunch of used up shit sacks waiting to go to dirt. — Lidia Yuknavitch

When someone says something dunderheaded to me about the material, it's usually a big neon sign revealing their own damage or ignorance, so my compassion kicks in. — Lidia Yuknavitch

Later, someone will come back and get her and take her back home. — Lidia Yuknavitch

Superpowers will topple and reorganize. — Lidia Yuknavitch

I don't have any problem understanding why people flunk out of college or quit their jobs or cheat on each other or break the law or spray-paint walls. A little bit outside of things is where some people feel each other. We do it to replace the frame of family. We do it to erase and remake our origins in their own images. To say, I too was here. — Lidia Yuknavitch

It seems important to them that he is a kind of villain in their stories. This seems American. — Lidia Yuknavitch

I do have one regret though. I wish Kathy Acker was still alive. I wish I could go swim with her again. My literary indebtedness to her is enormous. She's a more important mother to me than anyone can possibly imagine. In language I became a daughter worth a crap because of her. In language I redefined daughter, woman, I became a writer. Dora is an homage of sorts. — Lidia Yuknavitch

Birth is of course violent. Menstruation is violent. Trust me, if men's penises opened up once a month and shot blood, we'd be hearing about the violence of it. — Lidia Yuknavitch

I've come to ask my questions. The ones my dead girl left inside me.
Is it my fault.
What happened to you.
Are you happy.
What do you want from me. — Lidia Yuknavitch

Sometimes saviors look different than you thought they would. — Lidia Yuknavitch

Sometimes a mind is just born late, coming through waves on a slower journey. You were never, in the end, alone. Isn't it a blessing, what becomes from inside the alone? — Lidia Yuknavitch

We live through sound and light - through our technologies. — Lidia Yuknavitch

I get kind of tired of the "But it's your life!" attitude about memoir. I wrote. I engaged in artistic production. I made a piece of art. Why the preciousness or mystical unicorns around "memoir"? I'm curious how you feel about it just now. — Lidia Yuknavitch

I'm kind of still down with Virg Woolf on this one: "women must kill the aesthetic ideal through which they themselves have been 'killed' into art." — Lidia Yuknavitch

Worse, the bodies of women, minorities, children, disenfranchised bodies (prisoners, so-called nut cases, etc ... ) and their truths don't "count" as either present and important in society or worth Pulitzer prizes as characters in literature. — Lidia Yuknavitch

This is the first language of your body. It is the word ne. When you bleed each month, as when the moon comes and goes in its journey, you leave the world of men. You enter the body of all women, who are connected to all of nature. — Lidia Yuknavitch

One day the girl is taking a bath and calls out. The widow comes into the tiny bathroom and the water surrounding the girl's legs is clouded with crimson. She slaps the girl in the face and smiles and kisses her on the cheeks. She says, "May you bloom." The girl doesn't flinch. The widow tells her, "This is the first language of your body. It is the word ne. When you bleed each month, as when the moon comes and goes in its journey, you leave the world of men. You enter the body of all women, who are connected to all of nature." The girl asks, "Why is it the word ne?" The widow responds, "When you bleed, this word is more powerful than any word you could ever speak. It is a blood word. It binds you to animals and trees and the moon and the sun. Where men take blood in the world in hunting and war, women give blood. It is the word ne because it closes the room of a woman's body to men." The widow places her hands into the water and says, "Good. You are alive. You and I are alive. — Lidia Yuknavitch

Canada and Russia and Greenland will stake new claims in once-frozen waters. — Lidia Yuknavitch

What she thinks and feels is this: This is a world of men. They come into your country, they invade your home, they kill your family. They turn your body into the battlefield - the territory of all violence - all power - all life and death. And we take it. We do. We keep taking it. We have lost track of the reasons we do not slaughter the world of men, but we do not. Yes, there are good men. She sees the face of her father. She sees how the filmmaker loves the writer. She sees the yet-unwritten life of the writer's son. She sees her. brother. Beautiful smear. But it is the world of men that creates pure destruction. And this is a truth we cannot bear: Since we bear them into the world, we cannot kill them. Cannot be done with them. Cannot exile them into oblivion. — Lidia Yuknavitch

She's thinking about grief and trauma, how they can hide out inside a woman, how they can come back.
The playwright follows her eyes, until he sees what she sees.
The photographer's framed image, the orphan girl lit up by the explosion, a girl blowing forward, a girl coming out of fire, a girl who looks as if she might blast right through image and time into the world
"I know what's happened," the poet says. — Lidia Yuknavitch

What it has meant to stay alive when my daughter did not. What it has meant to suffer a heartbeat after carrying the weight and form of her inside my body, wedged just beneath that fist-shaped muscle. — Lidia Yuknavitch

It may be true too that I would not have encountered the most important books and art and ideas of my life had I not chased down a Ph.D. I've thought about that a lot ... MAYBE I would have found the same books on my own, but I can't know for sure. — Lidia Yuknavitch

To the daughters of Eve, that they may teach men that love is not lechery, nor the simony of voluptuousness, but a joy that dwells in the highest and holiest regions of the terrestrial paradise, that they may make it the highest prize of virtue, the most glorious conquest of genius, the first force of human progress. — Lidia Yuknavitch

One path I've used a lot is to deeply and thoughtfully consider a trope or a tradition, and then set about taking it apart - but only in the service of a character or story that deserves it. Another path I often employ is to put form into "play" - to set it free from its ordinary constraints and let it be free-floating and broken-apart and rearranged. — Lidia Yuknavitch

Any child is stronger than a mother, since the love we have for our children could kill us. — Lidia Yuknavitch

Two things have always ruptured up and through hegemony: art and bodies. — Lidia Yuknavitch

Little tragedies are difficult to keep straight. — Lidia Yuknavitch

Certainly I'm participating in an already established and awesome tradition, but it's a tradition that sort of shoots up and through the mainstream in short bursts and pulses and then gets diluted. Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson shot up and then got sucked back down underground under more entertaining and less radical versions of body and self - poetry and prose that posited bodies in more perfect union with good citizenship. — Lidia Yuknavitch

Photographs replace memory. Photographs replace lived experience. History. — Lidia Yuknavitch

We'd cry great waves of love and rage for this young woman, whose resistance made our own lives look empty as nadless ball sacks and sewed-up dry cunts, a girl-woman whose body was in defiance of over stab at "living" we took and failed on a daily basis. — Lidia Yuknavitch

I'd say art is with you. All around you. I'd say when there doesn't seem to be anyone else, there is art. I'd say you can love art how you wish to be loved. And I'd say art is a lifeline to the rest of us - we are out here. You are not alone. There is nothing about you that scares us. There is nothing unlovable about you, either. — Lidia Yuknavitch

People - I mean couples - don't like to talk much about fighting. It's not attractive. No one likes to admit it or describe it or lay claim to it. We want our coupledoms to look ... sanitized and pretty and worthy of admiration. And anger blasts are ugly. But, I think that is a crock. There is a kind of fighting that isn't ugly. There is a way for anger to come our as an energy you let loose and away. The trick is to give it a form, and not a human target. The trick is to transform rage. — Lidia Yuknavitch

We can't handle violence in women characters but we CAN handle what's done to women in our present tense every second of the day worldwide? Or next door? Or in political or medical discourse? Please. That idea just makes me want to crap on a table at a very fancy restaurant. — Lidia Yuknavitch

That image of Joan of Arc burning up in a fire burned inside me like a new religion. Her face skyward. Her faith muscled up like a holy war. And always the voice of a father in her head. Like me. Jesus. What is a thin man pinned to wood next to the image of a burning woman warrior ablaze? I took the image of a burning woman into my heart and left belief to the house of father forever. — Lidia Yuknavitch

Where does repressed pain and rage go in a body? Does the wound of daughter turn to something else if left unattended? Does it bloom in the belly like an anti-child, like an organic mass made of emotions that didn't have anywhere to go? How do we name the pain of rage in a woman? Mother? — Lidia Yuknavitch

I think I did it because I was hurting. I think I wanted to mark that hurt in the outside. I think I wanted to be someone else. But I didn't know who yet. — Lidia Yuknavitch

Everyone's last wish turned out to be love: may I be consumed by the simplicity and purity of a love story, any love, base love or heroic love or transgressive love or love that is a blind and lame and ridiculous lie - anything the opposite of alone and lonely and sexless, and the absence of someone to care about or talk to. — Lidia Yuknavitch

One of the things that bugs me about the Western Literary Tradition is that the conventions of narrative in particular seem to confine the stories you can tell about characters to tropes of bone-headed action and old models of psychological realism. And as readers, too, we have been conditioned to understand characters as - and forgive me for saying it out loud - what the market says they should be. Namely, safe, clean, proper. — Lidia Yuknavitch

And so, now, she runs. In her running, her mind leaves her.
And she can hear nothing but her heart, the blast making her deaf.
There is a great white silent empty in her running.
She runs. — Lidia Yuknavitch

It's a movie about everything. This world we live in. The bodies we're stuck with. The lives we get whether we want them or not. How hard you have to work just to get through a fucking day without killing yourself. — Lidia Yuknavitch

There's a girl calm people don't know about. It's a girl teen standstill. A motionless peace. It doesn't come from anywhere but inside us, and it only lasts for a few years. It's born from being a not woman yet. It's free flowing and invisible. It's the eye of the violent storm you call my teenage daughter. In this place we are undisturbed by all the moronic things you think about us. Our voices like rain falling. We are serene. Smooth. With more perfect hair and skin than you will ever again know. Daughters of Eve. — Lidia Yuknavitch

But it is the world of men that creates pure destruction. And this is a truth we cannot bear: Since we bear them into the world, we cannot kill them. — Lidia Yuknavitch

I tell you, it scares me what I have done to her. It terrifies me, even. And yet I am not sorry. I am as deeply unsorry as a person could be. There is nothing that one human will not do to another. — Lidia Yuknavitch

Have endless patterns and repetitions accompanying your thoughtlessness, as if to say let go of that other more linear story, with its beginning, middle, and end, with its transcendent end, let go, we are the poem, we have come miles of life, we have survived this far to tell you, go on, go on. — Lidia Yuknavitch

Memoirs have at their heart a content that "happened" to someone in real life. Is that what you are itching at in your question, so that if you are a reviewer or you are writing a critique you might feel as if you are stepping on someone's actual face? — Lidia Yuknavitch

If I hadn't spent a big chunk of time in academia I might not have the depth of consciousness I do about ideas like that. I might think, for instance, that Freud was no big deal in terms of the shape of social organization then or now. I might think that the discourses of politics and law are real and stable and fair. — Lidia Yuknavitch

It is possible to make family any way you like. It is possible to love men without rage. There are thousands of ways to love men. — Lidia Yuknavitch

I might think that equality has been achieved, there is no power relation going on in terms of class, race, or gender, I might just want to drink my latte and buy pretty shoes and write books about girls who marry, die, or go insane, then go get my nails done. — Lidia Yuknavitch

Seventeen times against the wall or in the barn: You move or scream or say anything I will kill them all. In front of you. First I will torture them and then I will kill them. Her eyes as dead as she can make them. Her arms as limp as she can make them. Her heart as hidden as she can make it. A soldier's cock entering the thin white flesh of a girl, into the small red cave of her, the fist of her heart pounding out be-dead, be-dead, be-dead.
Counting. — Lidia Yuknavitch

A little bit outside of things is where some people feel each other. We do it to replace the frame of family. We — Lidia Yuknavitch

Most of my formal choices are a combination of everything I learned about form - semiotics, linguistics, and the history of style experimentations tethered to literary movements (formalism, deconstruction, modernism, and postmodernism), and the basic principal of breaking every rule I ever learned from a patriarchal writing tradition that never included my body or experience, and thus has nothing to offer me in terms of representation. — Lidia Yuknavitch

As far as being territorial about one's own life, that's a mistake for ANY writer. All writers everywhere, in every genre, are drawing from their life and the lives of those around them for "material." Memoirs just make transparent and even amplify that activity. — Lidia Yuknavitch

I first read Freud's famous case study on hysteria based on his client Ida Bauer when I was in my twenties. It pissed me off so badly it haunted me for 25 years. But I had to wait to be a good enough writer to give Ida her voice back. And I had to go get my own first too. I not only know the case study inside and out, like most women, I lived a version of it. Maybe it's time for us to tell our versions. — Lidia Yuknavitch

I look for the moment(s) in the story where the writer risked abandoning the glory of the self in favor of the possible relationship with an other. I don't ever let the market tell me what a memoir is. The first best memoir I ever read was Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. — Lidia Yuknavitch

I never felt crazy, I just felt gone away. — Lidia Yuknavitch

To be honest, we live in an exciting time where form is concerned. My sincerest hope is that more people will notice this and agree to play and invent - the only way to not succumb to the complacency and market-driven schlock of the present tense is to continually interrogate it from the inside out. — Lidia Yuknavitch

People are often asking me if the things in my short stories really happened to me. I always think this is the same question to ask of a life - did this really happen to me? The body doesn't lie. But when we bring language to the body, isn't it always already an act of fiction? With its delightfully designed composition and color saturations and graphic patterns? Its style and vantage point? Its insistence on the mind's powerful force of recollection in the face of the raw and brutal fact that the only witness was the body? — Lidia Yuknavitch

That's about when it happens. Coming down the escalator from one Nord floor to the next we see Little Teena has commandeered the grand piano. He's busy busting out Bach to all the bewildered shoppers. Little Teena just doesn't look for Nordstromy sitting there, with his red hair slick up in a pompadour, his girth squeezing out between his black leather jacket and the lip of his jeans, gumball machine rings decorating every single one of his fingers. But it's hen he goes from Bach to Great Balls of Fire that we attract the attention of the Nordfuck's militia. — Lidia Yuknavitch

You know, every street in Paris is wet. Every person in Paris has a dog. Every hand in Paris holds a cigarette. Every mouth in Paris is a kiss. — Lidia Yuknavitch

If the family you came from sucked, make up a new one. Look at all the people there are to choose from. If the family you are in hurts, get on the bus. Like now. — Lidia Yuknavitch

But more often there are regular people in the pool. Beautiful women seniors doing water aerobics - mothers and grandmothers and great grandmothers - their massive breasts and guts reminding you how it is that women carry worlds. When I swim by them I watch their legs and bodies underwater, and feel a strange kinship with a maternal lineage. — Lidia Yuknavitch

Make up stories until you find one you can live with. — Lidia Yuknavitch

If you have ever fucked up in your life, or if the great river of sadness that runs through us all has touched you, then this book is for you. So thank you for the collective energy it takes to write in the face of culture. I can feel you. — Lidia Yuknavitch

The rocks. They carry the chronology of water. All things simultaneously living and dead in your hands. — Lidia Yuknavitch

There is no girl we are not always already making into a woman from the moment she is born - making a city in the dirt next to the boot of a man. It could be rage or love in his feet. The girl could be me or any other girl. — Lidia Yuknavitch

Women live their lives secretly waiting for their lives to become movies. We act like men are the ones shallow enough to desire an unending stream of beautiful women but really, if a charismatic narcissist beautiful bad boy man actually desires us, seems to choose us, we go to pieces. — Lidia Yuknavitch

We are all swimmers before the dawn of oxygen and earth. We all carry the memory of that breathable blue past. — Lidia Yuknavitch

You see it is important to understand how damaged people don't always know how to say yes, or to choose the big thing, even when it is right in front of them. It's a shame we carry. The shame of wanting something good. The shame of not believing we deserve to stand in the same room in the same way as all those we admire. Big red A's on our chests. — Lidia Yuknavitch

When they own languages, she thought, we are terrorists. When we own them, we are revolutionaries. — Lidia Yuknavitch

Underneath the forms of fiction and poetry, you can bet your ass the ground comes from someone's actual life experience. — Lidia Yuknavitch

You the swimmer, after all. And then you see the waves without pattern, scooping up everyone, throwing them around like so many floating heads, and you can only laugh in your sobbing at all the silly head bobbers. Laughter can shake you from the delirium of grief. — Lidia Yuknavitch

And if there is water there let it be from a river. And if there is peace let it be from silence and forgetting. From the slow settle of dust on a house worn down, on a history lost, on a woman buried quietly into geography. And if there is memory let it be disjointed and nonsensical, let it disturb understanding and logic, let it rise like birds or hands into the blood blue bone of the sky, whispering its nothing beyond telling. ( ... ) Let someone lose the captions to all of the photographs; let them pile into new logics and forms that outlive us.
- "Siberia: Still Life of a Moving Image" (6. Representation) — Lidia Yuknavitch