Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Lidia Yuknavitch
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: June 18
Author
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Hearing
Men
Birth
Penises
Months
Menstruation
Trust
Opened
Violence
Month
Blood
Shot
Violent
Courses
Shots
Course

More quotes by Lidia Yuknavitch

Image
In water, like in books—you can leave your life.
Lidia Yuknavitch
Image
Only when I make movements away from the tribe of indie art and literature. Maybe that's something important for me to keep thinking about. What you gain, what you lose, why and how. Maybe the edge of the page is the place for me. Maybe that's OK.
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
The maternal impulse in animals to protect their young - that kind of instinct and subsequent violence is quite beautiful. Mythic even.
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
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
We live through sound and light—through our technologies.
Lidia Yuknavitch
Image
Make up stories until you find one you can live with.
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
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.
Lidia Yuknavitch
Image
I just want my stories to be mine.
Lidia Yuknavitch
Image
The practice of employing metaphor and image and composition and linguistic choices to move the reader through the content.
Lidia Yuknavitch
Image
The convention of the coming-of-age story and the love story were literally abandoned - because they had to be - and a new kind of coming-of-age and love story emerged that required a different kind of telling the story.
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
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?
Lidia Yuknavitch
Image
The rocks. They carry the chronology of water. All things simultaneously living and dead in your hands.
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
Image
Words carry oceans on their small backs.
Lidia Yuknavitch