Top 120 Lidia Yuknavitch Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “You see it is important to understand how damaged people don’t always know how to say yes, or to choose the big thing, even when it is right in front of them. It’s a shame we carry. The shame of wanting something good. The shame of not believing we deserve to stand in the same room in the same way as all those we admire. Big red A’s on our chests.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

52. “Sometimes a mind is just born late, coming through waves on a slower journey. You were never, in the end, alone. Isn’t it a blessing, what becomes from inside the alone?”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

53. “But more often there are regular people in the pool. Beautiful women seniors doing water aerobics – mothers and grandmothers and great grandmothers – their massive breasts and guts reminding you how it is that women carry worlds. When I swim by them I watch their legs and bodies underwater, and feel a strange kinship with a maternal lineage.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

54. “Fiction and poetry expose intimate things from a person’s life every bit as much as memoir does, and sometimes more. I don’t quite see or live the distinction you are making about the forms.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

55. “Make up stories until you find one you can live with.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

56. “Little tragedies are difficult to keep straight.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

57. “I work from the body – I try to develop a language of the body. I’ve invented a term I call “corporeal writing” around that idea. I love teaching and collaborating around this idea, because no new breakthrough in literature ever happened because everyone was doing what was already there.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

58. “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.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

59. “To move violently and beautifully through skin, to enter matter-isn’t that evolution’s climax?”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

60. “Sometimes you grow up in the space of a minute.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

61. “Sometimes saviors look different than you thought they would.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

62. “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

63. “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?”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

64. “We are all swimmers before the dawn of oxygen and earth. We all carry the memory of that breathable blue past.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

65. “Underneath the forms of fiction and poetry, you can bet your ass the ground comes from someone’s actual life experience.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

66. “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

67. “I just want my stories to be mine.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

68. “My sister and I, we were selfish. We wanted selves. There was no rage or love that could stop us.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

69. “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?”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

70. “He made me feel like someone somebody would risk something to choose.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

71. “One life is all we have, and we live it as we believe in living it. But to sacrifice what you are, and to live without belief-that is a fate more terrible than dying.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

72. “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

73. “We laughed the laugh of women untethered, finally, from their origins.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

74. “Because in loving his darkness I found my own.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

75. “Do not listen to what any society tells you about the body – the body is the metaphor for all experience. A woman’s body more than any other. Like language, its beautiful but weaker sister. Look at this poem. This painting. Look at these photographs. The body doesn’t lie.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

76. “I learned from an early age that if it feels bad, it’s good, and if it feels good, you are bad.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

77. “Two things have always ruptured up and through hegemony: art and bodies.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

78. “I might think that equality has been achieved, there is no power relation going on in terms of class, race, or gender, I might just want to drink my latte and buy pretty shoes and write books about girls who marry, die, or go insane, then go get my nails done.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

79. “As Earth’s resources dwindle, technology is seized by those who kill best.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

80. “I ‘passed’ in every sphere of regular life I entered, but I entered those spheres less and less, and spent more and more time under the overpass.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

81. “It is possible to make family any way you like. It is possible to love men without rage. There are thousands of ways to love men.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

82. “Look at this poem. How it travels down the page in lines, not sentences. How its beauty is vertical, like a body.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

83. “It’s like we’re stars in space. It’s like space is the theater and we are the bits of stardust and everything everywhere is the story.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

84. “I didn’t know yet how wanting to die could be a bloodsong in your body that lives with you your whole life. I didn’t know then how deeply my mother’s song had swum into my sister and into me. I didn’t know that something like wanting to die could take form in one daughter as the ability to quietly surrender, and in the other as the ability to drive into death head-on. I didn’t know we were our mother’s daughters after all.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

85. “The stars were never there for us – we are not the reason for the night sky. The stars.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

86. “Photographs replace memory. Photographs replace lived experience. History.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

87. “I never felt crazy, I just felt gone away.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

88. “I thought of Shakespearean chiasmus. A chiasmus in language is a crisscross structure. A doubling back sentence. A doubling of meaning. My favorite is “love’s fire heats water, water cools not love.” As a motif, a chiasmus is a world within a world where transformation is possible. In the green world events and actions lose their origins. Like in dreams. Time loses itself. The impossible happens as if it were ordinary. First meanings are undone and remade by second meanings.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

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

— Lidia Yuknavitch

90. “It is only inside abstraction and expression and chaos that he is alive.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

91. “Words from my whole body, my entire life, or the lives of women and girls whose stories got stuck in their throats came gushing out.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

92. “America, land of coupling, land of sanctioned marriage and two-person twined knots, land of tireless good-citizen living, land of the happy family, land of the free and the brave and the locked imagination, land of ignorant homeowner masses lined up in twos.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

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

— Lidia Yuknavitch

94. “The safest memories are locked in the brains of people who can’t remember. Their memories remain the closest replica of actual events. Underwater. Forever. When.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

95. “Aren’t we all just shooting for a life where art matters?”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

96. “I think I did it because I was hurting. I think I wanted to mark that hurt in the outside. I think I wanted to be someone else. But I didn’t know who yet.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

97. “You know, every street in Paris is wet. Every person in Paris has a dog. Every hand in Paris holds a cigarette. Every mouth in Paris is a kiss.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

98. “We are what happens when the seemingly unthinkable celebrity rises to power. Our existence makes my eyes hurt.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

99. “You have to be ready to be anyone in moments of danger or love.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

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

— Lidia Yuknavitch