{"author":"Lidia Yuknavitch","author_id":"Lidia+Yuknavitch","total_quotes":26,"quotes":[{"text":"She’s thinking about grief and trauma, how they can hide out inside a woman, how they can come back.The playwright follows her eyes, until he sees what she sees.The photographer’s framed image, the orphan girl lit up by the explosion, a girl blowing forward, a girl coming out of fire, a girl who looks as if she might blast right through image and time into the world“I know what’s happened,” the poet says.","author":"Lidia Yuknavitch","tags":["grief","trauma"],"id":11557,"author_id":"Lidia+Yuknavitch"},{"text":"I just want my stories to be mine.","author":"Lidia Yuknavitch","tags":["dora-a-headcase","need","passion","writing"],"id":38778,"author_id":"Lidia+Yuknavitch"},{"text":"Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, lemme tell you. Those are big years. Everybody always thinks of it as a time of adolescence—just getting through to the real part of your life—but it's more than that. Sometimes your whole life happens in those years, and the rest of your life it's just the same story playing out with different characters. I could die tomorrow and have lived the main ups and downs of life. Pain. Loss. Love. And what you all so fondly refer to as wisdom. Wanna know the difference between adult wisdom and young adult wisdom? You have the ability to look back at your past and interpret it. I have the ability to look at my present and live it with my whole body.","author":"Lidia Yuknavitch","tags":["adolescence","dora-a-headcase","inspirational","lidia","wisdom","ya","young-adult","youth","yuknavitch"],"id":56483,"author_id":"Lidia+Yuknavitch"},{"text":"I considered quitting graduate school. I paid my ticket, I rode the ride. Right? Half the people I started with quit. I did not have to continue toward scholar. But something wouldn’t let me. Some deep wrestling match going on inside my rib house and gray matter. Some woman in me I’d never met. You know who she was? My intellect. When I opened the door and there she stood, with her sassy red reading glasses and fitted skirt and leather bookbag, I thought, who the hell are you? Crouching into a defensive posture and looking at her warily out of the corner of my eye. Watch out, woman. To which she replied, I’m Lidia. I have a desire toward language and knowledge that will blow your mind.","author":"Lidia Yuknavitch","tags":["intelligence","power"],"id":79740,"author_id":"Lidia+Yuknavitch"},{"text":"One day the girl is taking a bath and calls out. The widow comes into the tiny bathroom and the water surrounding the girl’s legs is clouded with crimson. She slaps the girl in the face and smiles and kisses her on the cheeks. She says, “May you bloom.” The girl doesn’t flinch. The widow tells her, “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.” The girl asks, “Why is it the word ne?” The widow responds, “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.” The widow places her hands into the water and says, “Good. You are alive. You and I are alive.","author":"Lidia Yuknavitch","tags":["menstruation","woman"],"id":105696,"author_id":"Lidia+Yuknavitch"},{"text":"I drop to the curb like childhood leaving a body.","author":"Lidia Yuknavitch","tags":["childhood","dora-a-headcase","lidia","yuknavitch"],"id":110139,"author_id":"Lidia+Yuknavitch"},{"text":"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.","author":"Lidia Yuknavitch","tags":["family","men"],"id":139712,"author_id":"Lidia+Yuknavitch"},{"text":"Leslie Marmon Silko whispers the story is long. No, longer. Longer than that even. Longer than anything. With Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath drink at the bar. Laugh the dark laughter in the dark light. Sing a dark drunken song of men. Make a slurry toast. Rock back and forth, and drink the dark, and bask in the wallow of women knowing what women know. Just for a night. When you need to feel the ground of your life and the heart of the world, there will be a bonfire at the edge of a canyon under a night sky where Joy Harjo will sing your bonesong. Go ahead-with Anne Carson - rebuild the wreckage of a life a word at a time, ignoring grammar and the forms that keep culture humming. Make word war and have it out and settle it, scattering old meanings like hacked to pieces paper doll confetti. The lines that are left … they are awake and growling. With Virginia Woolf there will perhaps be a long walk in a garden or along a shore, perhaps a walk that will last all day. She will put her arm in yours and gaze out. At your backs will be history. In front of you, just the ordinary day, which is of course your entire life. Like language. The small backs of words. Stretching out horizonless. I am in a midnight blue room. A writing room. With a blood red desk. A room with rituals and sanctuaries. I made it for myself. It took me years. I reach down below my desk and pull up a bottle of scotch. Balvenie. 30 year. I pour myself an amber shot. I drink. Warm lips, throat. I close my eyes. I am not Virginia Woolf. But there is a line of hers that keeps me well: Arrange whatever pieces come your way. I am not alone. Whatever else there was or is, writing is with me.","author":"Lidia Yuknavitch","tags":["women","writing"],"id":152922,"author_id":"Lidia+Yuknavitch"},{"text":"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 feeling 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 As on our chests. I never thought to myself growing up, be a lawyer. An astronaut. The President. A scientist. A doctor. An architect. I didn’t even think, be a writer. Aspiration gets stuck in some people. It’s difficult to think yes. Or up. When all you feel is fight or run.","author":"Lidia Yuknavitch","tags":["growth","survivor","transformation","trauma"],"id":169779,"author_id":"Lidia+Yuknavitch"},{"text":"What we need, is a break out. Out of our lives, out of Seattle, out of the dumb script of girl.","author":"Lidia Yuknavitch","tags":["girl","inspirational","lidia","script","seattle","yuknavitch"],"id":173433,"author_id":"Lidia+Yuknavitch"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":26,"pages":3,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}