Top 120 Lidia Yuknavitch Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

2. “The rocks. They carry the chronology of water. All things simultaneously living and dead in your hands.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

3. “Sometimes telling the story is the thing that saves your life.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

4. “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

5. “Where does repressed pain and rage go in a body? Does the wound of daughter turn to something else if left unattended? Does it bloom in the belly like an anti-child, like an organic mass made of emotions that didn’t have anywhere to go? How do we name the pain of rage in a woman? Mother?”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

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

— Lidia Yuknavitch

7. “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

8. “Books, like all art, breed in us desire. In times of crisis and fear and misrepresentation we need desire, or else we shut down and hide out in our houses, succumbing to infotainment and the ease of an available latte, turning off our brains and emotions. Books breed desire.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

9. “It dawned on me that we have to breathe and to find reasons to stay alive on our own terms.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

10. “And memory has no syntax.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

11. “What I learned from that intensely educational period of my life is that one kind of misfit is the person who suffers abuse or trauma and doesn’t transcend it in the socially hoped-for way. We take a wrong turn or go deeper down. That’s often looked at like a failure, but sometimes I wonder. I’ve learned things by taking the wrong turn or going down deeper that I could not have learned any other way.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

12. “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

13. “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

14. “Words carry oceans on their small backs.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

15. “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.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

16. “Language is a metaphor for experience. It’s as arbitrary as the mass of chaotic images we call memory–but we can put it into lines to narrativize over fear.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

17. “If I could go back, I’d coach myself. I’d be the woman who taught me how to stand up, how to want things, how to ask for them. I’d be the woman who says, your mind, your imagination, they are everything. Look how beautiful. You deserve to sit at the table. The radiance falls on all of us.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

18. “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.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

19. “She is at a crossroads: a child’s violent will to survive lodged in her chest where her heart should be, but an utter indifference along with it.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

20. “I believe in art the way other people believe in god. I say that because books and paintings and music and photography gave me an alternate world to inhabit when the one I was born into was a dead zone. I say it because if you, even inside whatever terror itches your skin, pick up a pen or a paintbrush, a camera or clay or a guitar, you already have what you are afraid to choose. Volition. It was already in you.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

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

— Lidia Yuknavitch

22. “Laughter can shake you from the delirium of grief.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

23. “When someone says something dunderheaded to me about the material, it’s usually a big neon sign revealing their own damage or ignorance, so my compassion kicks in.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

24. “Everyone’s last wish turned out to be love: may I be consumed by the simplicity and purity of a love story, any love, base love or heroic love or transgressive love or love that is a blind and lame and ridiculous lie – anything the opposite of alone and lonely and sexless, and the absence of someone to care about or talk to.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

25. “I am not alone. Whatever else there was or is, writing is with me.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

26. “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.””

— Lidia Yuknavitch

27. “Remember parts of your body are scattered in water all over the earth. Know land is made from you.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

28. “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

29. “In my real life I had to confront the sins of the father, but it’s also a symbolic journey – a social, psychological, sexual journey for women and minorities who must pass through patriarchy and the symbolic order in order to claim a self.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

30. “I am a woman who talks to herself and lies.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

31. “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.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

32. “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.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

33. “You can tell a lot about a person from seeing them in the water. Some people freak out and spaz their way around like giant insects, others slide in like seals, turn over, dive down, effortlessly. Some people kind of tread water with big goofy smiles, others look slightly broken-armed and broken-legged or as if they are in some kind of serious pain.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

34. “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

35. “I’m not the story you made of me.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

36. “There is a kind of fighting that isn’t ugly. There is a way for anger to come out as an energy you let loose and away. The trick is to give it a form, and not a human target. The trick is to transform rage.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

37. “We live through sound and light – through our technologies.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

38. “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

39. “The chief reason I shove the reader inside the body – or more specifically, the chief reason I try to get the reader to feel their own body while they are reading, is this: we live by and through the body, and the body, is a walking contradiction.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

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

— Lidia Yuknavitch

41. “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

42. “This is the first language of your body. It is the word ne. When you bleed each month, as when the moon comes and goes in its journey, you leave the world of men. You enter the body of all women, who are connected to all of nature.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

43. “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

44. “Women live their lives secretly waiting for their lives to become movies. We act like men are the ones shallow enough to desire an unending stream of beautiful women but really, if a charismatic narcissist beautiful bad boy man actually desires us, seems to choose us, we go to pieces.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

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

— Lidia Yuknavitch

46. “I get kind of tired of the “But it’s your life!” attitude about memoir. I wrote. I engaged in artistic production. I made a piece of art. Why the preciousness or mystical unicorns around “memoir”? I’m curious how you feel about it just now.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

47. “If the family you came from sucked, make up a new one. Look at all the people there are to choose from. If the family you are in hurts, get on the bus. Like now.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

48. “When you bleed, this word is more powerful than any word you could ever speak. It is a blood word. It binds you to animals and trees and the moon and the sun. Where men take blood in the world in hunting and war, women give blood. It is the word ne because it closes the room of a woman’s body to men.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

49. “We misfits are the ones with the ability to enter grief. Death. Trauma. And emerge.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

50. “I drop to the curb like childhood leaving a body.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch