Lidia Yuknavitch Quotes

Quotes about:

• Words carry oceans on their small backs.

  Lidia Yuknavitch

  Ocean

  Lidia Yuknavitch (2013). “The Chronology of Water: A Memoir”, p.176, Hawthorne Books

  52 Copy quote

• 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

  Art, Writing, Wish

  Interview with Molly Gaudry, thelitpub.com. June 2, 2011.

  28 Copy quote

• Your life doesn’t happen in any kind of order. Events don’t have cause and effect relationships the way you wish they did. It’s all a series of fragments and repetitions and pattern formations. Language and water have this in common.

  Lidia Yuknavitch

  Order, Water, Wish

  Lidia Yuknavitch (2011). “The Chronology of Water: A Memoir”, p.15, Hawthorne Books

  22 Copy quote

• Sometimes saviors look different than you thought they would.

  Lidia Yuknavitch

  Different, Looks, Sometimes

  Lidia Yuknavitch (2013). “Dora: A Headcase”, p.99, Hawthorne Books

  20 Copy quote

• Books, like all art, breed in us desire. In times of crisis and fear and misrepresentation we need desire, or else we shut down and hide out in our houses, succumbing to infotainment and the ease of an available latte, turning off our brains and emotions. Books breed desire.

  Lidia Yuknavitch

  Art, Book, House

  "The Urgent Matter of Books" by Lidia Yuknavitch, therumpus.net. May 03, 2011.

  19 Copy quote

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

  Lidia Yuknavitch

  Rocks, Hands, Water

  Lidia Yuknavitch (2013). “The Chronology of Water: A Memoir”, p.18, Hawthorne Books

  17 Copy quote

• 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 feeling 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 As on our chests.

  Lidia Yuknavitch

  Believe, People, Feelings

  Lidia Yuknavitch (2013). “The Chronology of Water: A Memoir”, p.130, Hawthorne Books

  16 Copy quote

• I am not alone. Whatever else there was or is, writing is with me.

  Lidia Yuknavitch

  Writing, Not Alone

  Lidia Yuknavitch (2013). “The Chronology of Water: A Memoir”, p.133, Hawthorne Books

  18 Copy quote

• 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

  Reality, Blow, Space

  Source: therumpus.net

  13 Copy quote

• 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

  Ignorance, Compassion, Neon

  Source: therumpus.net

  12 Copy quote

• Make up stories until you find one you can live with.

  Lidia Yuknavitch

  Stories

  Lidia Yuknavitch (2011). “The Chronology of Water: A Memoir”, p.194, Hawthorne Books

  9 Copy quote

• So yes I know how angry, or naive, or self-destructive, or messed up, or even deluded I sound weaving my way through these life stories at times. But beautiful things. Graceful things. Hopeful things can sometimes appear in dark places.

  Lidia Yuknavitch

  Life, Beautiful, Dark

  17 Copy quote

• 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

  Age, And Love, Different

  Source: therumpus.net

  10 Copy quote

• 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

  Play, People, Complacency

  Source: therumpus.net

  12 Copy quote

• In water, like in books—you can leave your life.

  Lidia Yuknavitch

  Book, Water

  Lidia Yuknavitch (2013). “The Chronology of Water: A Memoir”, p.99, Hawthorne Books

  11 Copy quote

• I work from the body - I try to develop a language of the body. I've invented a term I call "corporeal writing" around that idea. I love teaching and collaborating around this idea, because no new breakthrough in literature ever happened because everyone was doing what was already there.

  Lidia Yuknavitch

  Teaching, Writing, Ideas

  Source: therumpus.net

  6 Copy quote

• I've noticed over the past years of my writerly life that women writers in particular are discouraged in cleverly disguised forms from including the intellectual in their creative material way more than you would believe.

  Lidia Yuknavitch

  Believe, Past, Years

  Source: therumpus.net

  12 Copy quote

• 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

  Self, Looks, Stories

  Source: therumpus.net

  7 Copy quote

• I'm in love with language again because Luke B. Goebel is not afraid to take us back through the gullet of loss into the chaos of words. Someone burns a manuscript in Texas; someone's speed sets a life on fire; a heart is beaten nearly to death, the road itself is the trip, a man is decreated back to his animal past--better, beyond ego, beautiful, and look: there's an American dreamscape left. There's a reason to go on.

  Lidia Yuknavitch

  Beautiful, Heart, Loss

  10 Copy quote

• 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

  Hero, Men, Violent Acts

  Source: therumpus.net

  5 Copy quote

• In my real life I had to confront the sins of the father, but it's also a symbolic journey - a social, psychological, sexual journey for women and minorities who must pass through patriarchy and the symbolic order in order to claim a self.

  Lidia Yuknavitch

  Father, Real, Journey

  Source: therumpus.net

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Writing, Editors, Agents

  Source: therumpus.net

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Crazy, Ocean, Struggle

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Daughter, Mother, Regret

  Source: therumpus.net

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Years, Voice, Hysteria

  Source: therumpus.net

  10 Copy quote

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