Quote

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

Lidia Yuknavitch

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Lidia Yuknavitch
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: June 18
Author
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Metaphor
Content
Image
Reader
Move
Choices
Linguistic
Practice
Employing
Moving
Composition

More quotes by Lidia Yuknavitch

Image
Make up stories until you find one you can live with.
Lidia Yuknavitch
Image
To be honest, we live in an exciting time where form is concerned. My sincerest hope is that more people will notice this and agree to play and invent - the only way to not succumb to the complacency and market-driven schlock of the present tense is to continually interrogate it from the inside out.
Lidia Yuknavitch
Image
Though I consider The Chronology of Water to be an anti-memoir for very precise reasons, it is an art form, and thus as open to critique as any other art form. Memoir has a form, formal strategies, issues of composition and craft, style, structure, all the elements of fiction or nonfiction or painting or music or what have you.
Lidia Yuknavitch
Image
As far as being territorial about one's own life, that's a mistake for ANY writer. All writers everywhere, in every genre, are drawing from their life and the lives of those around them for material. Memoirs just make transparent and even amplify that activity.
Lidia Yuknavitch
Image
Poetry, for example, goes so deeply into the space between corporeal affect and deep emotion (even primal in some cases) that, as Emily Dickinson said, it can blow the top of your head off. Poetic language is sometimes misunderstood as abstract when in reality, it's precise - precisely the language of emotions and the body.
Lidia Yuknavitch
Image
If I hadn't spent a big chunk of time in academia I might not have the depth of consciousness I do about ideas like that. I might think, for instance, that Freud was no big deal in terms of the shape of social organization then or now. I might think that the discourses of politics and law are real and stable and fair.
Lidia Yuknavitch
Image
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.
Lidia Yuknavitch
Image
Because rage and violence are human emotions and drives and capacities that inhabit us all. SEE CARL JUNG. Or that hipster Joseph Campbell. Because we all take archetypal journeys in a million ways - literal, symbolic, you name it - that figure, disfigure, and refigure violence.
Lidia Yuknavitch
Image
The memoir as a somewhat indistinct form is absolutely true. So many of the memoirs I've read, and the ones I have gravitated toward most, somehow upend what I expect from memoir and the project seems greater than just the exposition of a life.
Lidia Yuknavitch
Image
The maternal impulse in animals to protect their young - that kind of instinct and subsequent violence is quite beautiful. Mythic even.
Lidia Yuknavitch
Image
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.
Lidia Yuknavitch
Image
I just want my stories to be mine.
Lidia Yuknavitch
Image
I've noticed over the past years of my writerly life that women writers in particular are discouraged in cleverly disguised forms from including the intellectual in their creative material way more than you would believe.
Lidia Yuknavitch
Image
In water, like in books—you can leave your life.
Lidia Yuknavitch
Image
I drop to the curb like childhood leaving a body.
Lidia Yuknavitch
Image
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.
Lidia Yuknavitch
Image
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.
Lidia Yuknavitch
Image
Words carry oceans on their small backs.
Lidia Yuknavitch
Image
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.
Lidia Yuknavitch
Image
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.
Lidia Yuknavitch