Lidia Yuknavitch Quotes

Words carry oceans on their small backs.

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.

Sometimes saviors look different than you thought they would.

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

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

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.

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

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

Laughter can shake you from the delirium of grief

We live through sound and light—through our technologies.

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

I drop to the curb like childhood leaving a body.

I just want my stories to be mine.

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.

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

I don't have much interest in writing if there are not opportunities to crack open the inherited forms. The writing I love to read most does this as well. I'm a form junkie.

The practice of employing metaphor and image and composition and linguistic choices to move the reader through the content.

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."

What we need, is a break out. Out of our lives, out of Seattle, out of the dumb script of girl.

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.

my parents Oedipal fakers

Language is a metaphor for experience. It’s as arbitrary as the mass of chaotic images we call memory–but we can put it into lines to narrativize over fear.

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

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.

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

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.

I kiss her. I kiss her and kiss her. I try not to bite her lip. She tastes like vodkahoney.