Lidia Frederico Quotes

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

Civil society has not lost the possibility to influence the government and force them to change their policy. That is why we believe in your voice and your help. ~ Lidia Yusupova

I have a Madonna portrait done in the style of a Russian icon. My mother, the chef Lidia Bastianich, and I bought it together. It reminds me of her. ~ Joe Bastianich

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

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

A more miserable life is better...believe me..than an existence protected by an organized society...where everything is calculated....where everything is perfect... ~ Frederico Fellini

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

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. Besides, I'm trying to tell you the truth of a woman like me. ~ Lidia Yuknavitch

Make up stories until you find one you can live with. ~ Lidia Yuknavitch

I'm not sure it is possible to articulate grief through language. You can say, I was so sad I thought my bones would collapse. I thought I would die. But language always falls short of the body when it comes to the intensity of corporeal experience. The best we can do is bring language in relationship to corporeal experience-bring words close to the body-as close as possible. Close enough to shatter them. Or close enough to knock a body out. To bring language close to the intensity of experiences like love or death or grief or pain is to push on the affect of language. Its sounds and grunts and ecstatic noises. The ritual sense of language. Or the cry. ~ Lidia Yuknavitch

This man was gorgeous. I'm mentioning this because 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. We suddenly feel like we are finally in that movie rather than a life. Just what we always wanted. To be chosen by the best looking man in the room. Rhett Butler. Even though we are of course smarter and more mature and more together than to ever want that. Or admit it. ~ Lidia Yuknavitch

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

Sometimes saviors look different than you thought they would. ~ Lidia Yuknavitch

Remember parts of your body are scattered in water all over the earth. Know land is made from you. ~ Lidia Yuknavitch

The WRITER of memoir gets incoming weirdness in very odd ways. I was recently talking to a memoir writer whose work just went meteoric - but some of the comments and communications and gestures she gets in the wake of that success are stunningly and atrociously over-personal, as if suddenly people feel like they know her and her life intimately, and have permission to transgress all her "life" boundaries. ~ Lidia Yuknavitch

The practice of employing metaphor and image and composition and linguistic choices to move the reader through the content. ~ Lidia Yuknavitch

Look at the sunset
As a hope for tomorrow
I hope that you don't keep your pain a secret
And that you don't look at life with sorrow ~ Lidia Longorio

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

Canada and Russia and Greenland will stake new claims in once-frozen waters. ~ Lidia Yuknavitch

Aspiration gets stuck in some people. It's difficult to think yes. Or up. When all you feel is fight or run. ~ Lidia Yuknavitch

Which is mightily ironic since one of the most common criticisms of American women novelists (it's a load of crap but it gets bandied about a good bit) is that they don't write the "big" stories about "universal" or "worldly" concepts ... Jesus. Um, when we do? We get told to get back in the kitchen and bedroom - go back to writing about love-y wife-y mother-y things. ~ Lidia Yuknavitch

Because in loving his darkness I found my own. ~ Lidia Yuknavitch

Through the doorway to choice and hope were the saddest girls I have ever met. Not because someone beat them or because someone molested them or because they were poor or pregnant or even because they put needles in their arms or pills in their mouths or weed in their lungs or alcohol down their ever-constricting throats. They were the saddest girls I have ever met because every one of them had it in her to lose a shot at a self and become her mother. ~ Lidia Yuknavitch

You'd think I'd be used to loud noises with the constant screaming in my head. ~ Lidia Longorio

Only the violent acts of men "count" toward something besides evil in a patriarchy. It is the male story of violence that is sanctioned both socially and aesthetically. The male hero and acts of heroism require violence. Everyone is okey dokey with that. We are only beginning to see that constricting set of truths open up a little. ~ Lidia Yuknavitch

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. ~ Lidia Yuknavitch

Pity the small backs of children, he heard her saying. They carry death for us the second they are born. ~ Lidia Yuknavitch

We live through sound and light - through our technologies. ~ Lidia Yuknavitch

With Hélène Cixous you must close your eyes and open your mouth. Wider. So open your throat opens. Your esophagus. Your lungs. Wider. So open your spine unclatters. Your hips swim loose. Your womb worlds itself. Wider. Open the well of your sex. Now speak your body from your other mouth. Yell corporeal prayer. This is writing. ~ Lidia Yuknavitch

Most of my formal choices are a combination of everything I learned about form - semiotics, linguistics, and the history of style experimentations tethered to literary movements (formalism, deconstruction, modernism, and postmodernism), and the basic principal of breaking every rule I ever learned from a patriarchal writing tradition that never included my body or experience, and thus has nothing to offer me in terms of representation. ~ Lidia Yuknavitch

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

Be yourself but don't remain the same because you deserve growth. ~ Lidia Longorio

I think way too much and speak way too little. ~ Lidia Longorio

What it has meant to stay alive when my daughter did not. What it has meant to suffer a heartbeat after carrying the weight and form of her inside my body, wedged just beneath that fist-shaped muscle. ~ Lidia Yuknavitch

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

Julia edged closer, wondering what kind of vocabulary dogs understood. Frederico Fellini, her cat, was an intellectual and she could talk about books and films to him, as long as it was after he'd been fed, and fed well. She had the vague notion that dogs preferred football and politics. ~ Lisa Marie Rice

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

Don't believe everything you tell yourself. ~ Lidia Longorio

How did she get here, I mean how did she really get here, what were the choices, what's a past–she takes a long drink–what is psychological development? Is it as fucking Freudian as it sounds? She sighs the big sigh of twenty-six, wondering if we are all trapped inside identity, genetics, and narrative–some whacked-out Kafka god handwriting our unbearable little life stories. Then she thinks the American-artist thought, the rough-and-tumble kind: how can I use this? ~ Lidia Yuknavitch

I've come to ask my questions. The ones my dead girl left inside me.
Is it my fault.
What happened to you.
Are you happy.
What do you want from me. ~ Lidia Yuknavitch

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