142 Quotes by Lidia Yuknavitch

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?

A little bit outside of things is where some people feel each other. We do it to replace the frame of family. We.

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

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

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

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.

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?

It is not a perfect place, America. It’s simply a way out of this story.

Any child is stronger than a mother, since the love we have for our children could kill us.