Lidia Yuknavitch Quotes

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

If I could go back, I'd coach myself. I'd be the woman who taught me how to stand up, how to want things, how to ask for them. I'd be the woman who says, your mind, your imagination, they are everything. Look how beautiful. You deserve to sit at the table. The radiance falls on all of us.

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.

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

I am a woman who talks to herself and lies.

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. Besides, I'm trying to tell you the truth of a woman like me.

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.

I never felt crazy, I just felt gone away.

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.

We misfits are the ones with the ability to enter grief. Death. Trauma. And emerge.

He treated...my scarred as shit past and body as chapters of a book he wanted to hold in his hands and finish.

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.

I just want my stories to be mine.

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.

Sometimes saviors look different than you thought they would.

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

Because in loving his darkness I found my own.

I learned from an early age that if it feels bad, it's good, and if it feels good, you are bad

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.

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.

You can be a drunk. You can be a survivor of abuse. You can be an ex-con. You can be a homeless person. You can lose all your money or your job or a husband or a wife, or the worst thing imaginable, a child. You can lose your marbles. You can be standing inside your own failure, a small sad stone in your throat, and still you are beautiful, your story is worth hearing, because you--you rare and phenomenal misfit--are the only one in the world who can tell the story the way that only you can.

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 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.

It dawned on me that we have to breathe and to find reasons to stay alive on our own terms.

There are thousands of ways to love men, Lidia Yuknavitch once wrote, and when I watch my brothers button their shirts, or body slam my niece, or dance with their lips puckered, I think I know all of them.

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.

He made me feel like someone somebody would risk something to choose.

We laughed the laugh of women untethered, finally, from their origins.

I'm not the story you made of me.

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.

Little tragedies are difficult to keep straight.

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

We are what happens when the seemingly unthinkable celebrity rises to power. Our existence makes my eyes hurt.

If you are one of those people who has the ability to make it down to the bottom of the ocean, the ability to swim the dark waters without fear, the astonishing ability to move through life's worst crucibles and not die, then you also have the ability to bring something back to the surface that helps others in a way that they cannot achieve themselves.

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.

What I learned from that intensely educational period of my life is that one kind of misfit is the person who suffers abuse or trauma and doesn't transcend it in the socially hoped-for way. We take a wrong turn or go deeper down. That's often looked at like a failure, but sometimes I wonder. I've learned things by taking the wrong turn or going down deeper that I could not have learned any other way.

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.

I drop to the curb like childhood leaving a body.

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

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?

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.

There is a kind of fighting that isn’t ugly. There is a way for anger to come out 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.

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.

What if, for once in history, a woman's story could be untethered from what we need it to be in order to feel better about ourselves?

Remember parts of your body are scattered in water all over the earth. Know land is made from you.

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

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

I 'passed' in every sphere of regular life I entered, but I entered those spheres less and less, and spent more and more time under the overpass.

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.

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.

I believe in art the way other people believe in god. I say that because books and paintings and music and photography gave me an alternate world to inhabit when the one I was born into was a dead zone. I say it because if you, even inside whatever terror itches your skin, pick up a pen or a paintbrush, a camera or clay or a guitar, you already have what you are afraid to choose. Volition. It was already in you.

We live through sound and light—through our technologies.

see the stories of women, but they are always stuck inside the stories of men. Why is that?

My sister and I, we were selfish. We wanted selves. There was no rage or love that could stop us.

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

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

Sometimes telling the story is the thing that saves your life.

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

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. I never thought to myself growing up, be a lawyer. An astronaut. The President. A scientist. A doctor. An architect. I didn’t even think, be a writer. Aspiration gets stuck in some people. It’s difficult to think yes. Or up. When all you feel is fight or run.

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.

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.

This man was gorgeous. I'm mentioning this because 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. We suddenly feel like we are finally in that movie rather than a life. Just what we always wanted. To be chosen by the best looking man in the room. Rhett Butler. Even though we are of course smarter and more mature and more together than to ever want that. Or admit it.

too—my god, what kind of brutal abomination dismisses the suffering of the majority of the world’s population as worth sustaining a tiny number of pinheaded elites—is proof enough that we don’t deserve a future. I

With Hélène Cixous you must close your eyes and open your mouth. Wider. So open your throat opens. Your esophagus. Your lungs. Wider. So open your spine unclatters. Your hips swim loose. Your womb worlds itself. Wider. Open the well of your sex. Now speak your body from your other mouth. Yell corporeal prayer. This is writing.

Who are we in moments of crisis or despair? Do we become deeper, truer selves, or lift up and away from a self, untethered from regular meanings like moths suddenly drawn toward heat or light? Are we better people when someone might be dying, and if so, why? Are we weaker, or stronger? Are we beautiful, or abject? Serious, or cartoon? Do we secretly long for death to remind us we are alive?

You must let it glide on surfaces so you don't make a mess of things

We drank everything his favorite poet drank-Bukowski- and like Bukowski's women, I matched him drink for drink. We drank each other blind.

To move violently and beautifully through skin, to enter matter-isn't that evolution's climax?

People are forever thinking that the unthinkable can't happen.

And maybe that's what a misfit is to me: someone with the ability to become increasingly dangerous, in incredibly loving ways, and not care what people think about it. [written by Jason Arias]

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.

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.

You can tell a lot about a person from seeing them in the water. Some people freak out and spaz their way around like giant insects, others slide in like seals, turn over, dive down, effortlessly. Some people kind of tread water with big goofy smiles, others look slightly broken-armed and broken-legged or as if they are in some kind of serious pain.

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?

Sadece babam ve aşırı tatlı bir şeyin salonda asılı kalmış kokusu. Çocukluk gibi.

One life is all we have, and we live it as we believe in living it. But to sacrifice what you are, and to live without belief-that is a fate more terrible than dying.

[...] I hated god. [...] I hated my father most of all, a hate that never left but changed forms. My life had been ruined by men.

If I could go back, I’d coach myself. I’d be the woman who taught me how to stand up, how to want things, how to ask for them. I’d be the woman who says, your mind, you imagination, they are everything. Look how beautiful. You deserve to sit at the table. The radiance falls on all of us. I

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.

If you don’t have a twin in a tribe I’m telling you - drop whatever you are doing in your life and go look for them. The twin and the tribe. I’m serious. Because having a bloodword tie and a tribe pretty much saved me from myself. If I had tried to live one more year trying to be like the people around me I wouldn’t have lasted long.

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.

How did she get here, I mean how did she really get here, what were the choices, what’s a past–she takes a long drink–what is psychological development? Is it as fucking Freudian as it sounds? She sighs the big sigh of twenty-six, wondering if we are all trapped inside identity, genetics, and narrative–some whacked-out Kafka god handwriting our unbearable little life stories. Then she thinks the American-artist thought, the rough-and-tumble kind: how can I use this?

If we look at history - those of us who study it, who can remember it - we understand the reason why those who come to power swiftly, amid extreme national crises, are so dangerous: during such crises, we all turn into children aching for a good father. And the truth is, in our fear and despair, we'll take any father. Even if his furor is dangerous. It's as if humans can't understand how to function without a father. Perhaps especially then, we mistake heroic agency for its dark other.

is a way for anger to come out 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. When I watch Andy work the heavy bag, or work his body to drop doing mixed martial arts, I see that anger can go somewhere - out and away from a body - like an energy let loose and given form. Like my junk comes out in art.

I’m not sure it is possible to articulate grief through language. You can say, I was so sad I thought my bones would collapse. I thought I would die. But language always falls short of the body when it comes to the intensity of corporeal experience. The best we can do is bring language in relationship to corporeal experience-bring words close to the body-as close as possible. Close enough to shatter them. Or close enough to knock a body out. To bring language close to the intensity of experiences like love or death or grief or pain is to push on the affect of language. Its sounds and grunts and ecstatic noises. The ritual sense of language. Or the cry.

I considered quitting graduate school. I paid my ticket, I rode the ride. Right? Half the people I started with quit. I did not have to continue toward scholar. But something wouldn’t let me. Some deep wrestling match going on inside my rib house and gray matter. Some woman in me I’d never met. You know who she was? My intellect. When I opened the door and there she stood, with her sassy red reading glasses and fitted skirt and leather bookbag, I thought, who the hell are you? Crouching into a defensive posture and looking at her warily out of the corner of my eye. Watch out, woman. To which she replied, I’m Lidia. I have a desire toward language and knowledge that will blow your mind.

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.

Havva’nın yılana kanan bir salak olduğunu hiçbir zaman düşünmedim. Bence Havva belalı bir tipti.

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.

A Japanese woman friend whose infant son died seven days into his life - no detectable reason - just the small breathing becoming nothing until it disappeared, told me that in Japan, there is a two-term word - “mizugo” - which translates loosely to “water children.” Children who did not live long enough to enter the world as we live in it. In Japan, there are rituals for mothers and families, practices and prayers for the water children. There are shrines where a person can visit and deliver words and love and offerings to the water children.

You do not deserve most of what has happened or will. But there is something I can offer you. Whoever you are. Out there. As lonely as it gets, you are not alone. There is another kind of love. It’s the love of art. Because I believe in art the way other people believe in god. In art I’ve met an army of people - a tribe that gives good company and courage and hope. In books and painting and music and film. This book? It’s for you. It’s water I made a path through. I’m not speaking out of my asshole when I say this. Come in. The water will hold you.

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.

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.

I thought of Shakespearean chiasmus. A chiasmus in language is a crisscross structure. A doubling back sentence. A doubling of meaning. My favorite is “love’s fire heats water, water cools not love.” As a motif, a chiasmus is a world within a world where transformation is possible. In the green world events and actions lose their origins. Like in dreams. Time loses itself. The impossible happens as if it were ordinary. First meanings are undone and remade by second meanings.

He was too beautiful. Way more beautiful than me and way more beautiful than a beautiful woman. Have you met these men? His too beautiful voice and his beautiful hands and his beautiful cock. But the beauty went all haywire on the inside because he thought he was shit. And that thinking he was shit? It transformed him into the exact opposite of me - the most passive man on the planet. Particularly around any kind of high energy or conflict. Which was basically me, in the flesh.

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.

Leslie Marmon Silko whispers the story is long. No, longer. Longer than that even. Longer than anything. With Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath drink at the bar. Laugh the dark laughter in the dark light. Sing a dark drunken song of men. Make a slurry toast. Rock back and forth, and drink the dark, and bask in the wallow of women knowing what women know. Just for a night. When you need to feel the ground of your life and the heart of the world, there will be a bonfire at the edge of a canyon under a night sky where Joy Harjo will sing your bonesong. Go ahead-with Anne Carson - rebuild the wreckage of a life a word at a time, ignoring grammar and the forms that keep culture humming. Make word war and have it out and settle it, scattering old meanings like hacked to pieces paper doll confetti. The lines that are left … they are awake and growling. With Virginia Woolf there will perhaps be a long walk in a garden or along a shore, perhaps a walk that will last all day. She will put her arm in yours and gaze out. At your backs will be history. In front of you, just the ordinary day, which is of course your entire life. Like language. The small backs of words. Stretching out horizonless. I am in a midnight blue room. A writing room. With a blood red desk. A room with rituals and sanctuaries. I made it for myself. It took me years. I reach down below my desk and pull up a bottle of scotch. Balvenie. 30 year. I pour myself an amber shot. I drink. Warm lips, throat. I close my eyes. I am not Virginia Woolf. But there is a line of hers that keeps me well: Arrange whatever pieces come your way. I am not alone. Whatever else there was or is, writing is with me.

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)

We are what happens when the seemingly unthinkable celebrity rises to power. Our existence makes my eyes hurt. People are forever thinking that the unthinkable can't happen. If it doesn't exist in thought, then it can't exist in life. And then, in the blink of an eye, in a moment of danger, a figure who takes power from our weak desires and failures emerges like a rib from sand. Jean de Men. Some strange combination of a military dictator and a spiritual charlatan. A war-hungry mountebank. How stupidly we believe in our petty evolutions. Yet another case of something shiny that entertained us and then devoured us. We consume and become exactly what we create. In all times.

In the film Death and the Maiden, there is a point during which Sigourney Weaver has duct-taped Ben Kingsley to a chair in her living room. The characters are re-enacting a reverse torture scene. To move the plot of a woman tortured toward its desire: to torture the torturer. To extract a confession. The chair is a prop. A prop is a stage object that supports the drama. If the audience suspends their disbelief the chair transforms itself in time and space. If the audience is left unconvinced the chair is silly and imaginable in anyone’s living room. In the film Romeo is Bleeding Lena Olin sits in a chair and spreads her legs so that her cunt can be seen/scene. Her nationality keeps slipping; she is what we want her to be in a million ways. Her severed arm our severed arms. Her mouth opening like a country. In the film Exotica Atom Egoyan has the male lead (primary actor, financial draw) sit in a chair immobile while a child-stripper dances excruciatingly close to his body. His hands on his thighs. His mouth open. His mind seated. Torture. In the film Barbarella Jane Fonda is trapped inside of a science fiction sexual orgasm chair. This is before her politics come. In the film Breaker Morant two men mutated soldiers lost are executed—shot through the chest—while seated in chairs. In my kitchen I jack my father off while he sits in a chair, my hand smally domestic, the back of the chair holding his back, the legs of the chair forgiving his weight, the wood of the chair blonde, the hair of the girl blonde, the room magnified to cinematic proportions.