142 Quotes by 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.”

And the world will continue to be melted by a sun we’ve crossed terribly with our progress.

Laughter can shake you from the delirium of grief.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.