And so, now, she runs. In her running, her mind leaves her. And she can hear nothing but her heart, the blast making her deaf. There is a great white silent empty in her running. She runs.

— Lidia Yuknavitch

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

Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, let me 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. Want to 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.

— Lidia Yuknavitch

However, narrating what you remember, telling it to someone, does something else. The more a person recalls a memory, the more they change it. Each time they put it into language, it shifts. The more you describe a memory, the more likely it is that you are making a story that fits your life, resolves the past, creates a fiction you can live with. It’s what writers do. Once you open your mouth, you are moving away from the truth of things. According to neuroscience. 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.

— Lidia Yuknavitch

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.

— Lidia Yuknavitch

I didn’t know yet how wanting to die could be a blood song 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. Furthermore, 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. Furthermore, I didn’t know we were our mother’s daughters after all.

— Lidia Yuknavitch

I drop to the curb like childhood leaving a body.

— Lidia Yuknavitch

I just want my stories to be mine.

— Lidia Yuknavitch

I kiss her. I kiss her and kiss her. Furthermore, I try not to bite her lip. She tastes like vodka honey.

— Lidia Yuknavitch

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. When I watch Andy work the heavy bag, or work his body to drop doing mixed martial arts, I see that anger can go somewhere - out and away from a body - like an energy let loose and given form. Like my junk comes out in art.

— Lidia Yuknavitch