142 Quotes by Lidia Yuknavitch

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?

And memory has no syntax.

Dead infants don’t get urns unless you pay for them – and then they stuff crap in besides just ashes to cover the smallness.

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.

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.

Do not do not do not behave “like an immigrant.” Do not out yourself. Language is a funny thing, she thought. It opens and closes. It trips you like a crack in the sidewalk. Keep moving or die.

I love the walking contradiction of the body. I want to make corporeal characters, corporeal writing, I want to bring the intensities and contradictions and beauty and violence and stench and desire and astonishing physicality of the body back into literature.

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.

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