Lidia Yuknavitch Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• 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

  Character, Forgive Me, Forgiving

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Real, Writing, Heart

  Source: therumpus.net

  5 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

• Because rage and violence are human emotions and drives and capacities that inhabit us all. SEE CARL JUNG. Or that hipster Joseph Campbell. Because we all take archetypal journeys in a million ways - literal, symbolic, you name it - that figure, disfigure, and refigure violence.

  Lidia Yuknavitch

  Hipster, Journey, Names

  Source: therumpus.net

  7 Copy quote

• One of the reasons I love language is that concerning semiotics, language is an arbitrary sign system, which means the signs within it are free-floating, but we put them in a certain order to get them to have meaning for us. If we left them alone, they'd be like water, like the ocean. It would be just this vast field of free-floating matter or signs, so in this way, I think language and water have much in common. It's only us bringing grammar and syntax and diction and the human need for meaning that orders language, hierarchizes it.

  Lidia Yuknavitch

  Ocean, Mean, Thinking

  Source: therumpus.net

  6 Copy quote

• The chief reason I shove the reader inside the body - or more specifically, the chief reason I try to get the reader to feel their own body while they are reading, is this: we live by and through the body, and the body, is a walking contradiction.

  Lidia Yuknavitch

  Reading, Trying, Body

  Source: therumpus.net

  6 Copy quote

• On a spectrum of literary productions, memoir is just another form. If the person doing the reviewing or critiquing was ill-educated about literary forms, they could write something dunderheaded about the author or their life (I've seen these and barfed at them), but anyone who is well-practiced and educated in literature - why would they leave that at the door when entering memoir?

  Lidia Yuknavitch

  Writing, Doors, Entering

  Source: therumpus.net

  6 Copy quote

• I just want my stories to be mine.

  Lidia Yuknavitch

  Stories, Want, Mines

  Lidia Yuknavitch (2013). “Dora: A Headcase”, p.142, Hawthorne Books

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Real, Thinking, Law

  Source: therumpus.net

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Doe, Fiction, Sometimes

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• Aspiration gets stuck in some people. It's difficult to think yes. Or up. When all you feel is fight or run.

  Lidia Yuknavitch

  Running, Fighting, Thinking

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

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Letting Go, Stories, Goes On

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

  7 Copy quote

• We live through sound and light—through our technologies.

  Lidia Yuknavitch

  Technology, Light, Sound

  Lidia Yuknavitch (2013). “Dora: A Headcase”, p.1, Hawthorne Books

  7 Copy quote

• Which is mightily ironic since one of the most common criticisms of American women novelists (it's a load of crap but it gets bandied about a good bit) is that they don't write the "big" stories about "universal" or "worldly" concepts...Jesus. Um, when we do? We get told to get back in the kitchen and bedroom - go back to writing about love-y wife-y mother-y things.

  Lidia Yuknavitch

  Mother, Jesus, Writing

  Source: therumpus.net

  7 Copy quote

• Every once in a while a messy character who manifests a REAL body emerges, for instance, Lisbeth Salander - and certainly commercial genre fiction is full of examples of real bodied sexual encounters or violence encounters - but for the most part, and particularly if you are a woman or minority author, your characters' bodies have to fit a kind of norm inside a narrow set of narrative pre-ordained and sanctioned scripts.

  Lidia Yuknavitch

  Real, Character, Example

  Source: therumpus.net

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Character, Play, Broken

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Girl, Teacher, Smart

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• Only when I make movements away from the tribe of indie art and literature. Maybe that's something important for me to keep thinking about. What you gain, what you lose, why and how. Maybe the edge of the page is the place for me. Maybe that's OK.

  Lidia Yuknavitch

  Art, Thinking, Important

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Character, Doors, Ideas

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Girl, Book, Writing

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Baby, Character, Fighting

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Art, Kind, Aesthetic

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• The maternal impulse in animals to protect their young - that kind of instinct and subsequent violence is quite beautiful. Mythic even.

  Lidia Yuknavitch

  Beautiful, Animal, Violence

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Mistake, Drawing, Amplify

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

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