Reading the Waves Quotes

“I have a fear in me. Something I hope isn't true. It is that the holes inside his parents that drove them into each other's arms as well as into making art are also in his body somehow. Like he carries a trace of our sadness and pain even as he will become a completely different person.”
― Lidia Yuknavitch, Reading the Waves: A Memoir

“No one taught me what a period was, or sex, or cooking or cleaning or taking care of myself. No one taught me how to win races, or how to become an escape artist, or how to carry pain, or how to resist the pull to die. I made it up.”
― Lidia Yuknavitch, Reading the Waves: A Memoir

“Inside the alone, a grief bird freed herself.

Never let anyone tell you your grief is an emptiness.

There is an alone inside grief, and it is yours, and the alone is both unbearable and simultaneously beautiful. Never let anyone tell you how long your grief should last, or what to do with it.”
― Lidia Yuknavitch, Reading the Waves: A Memoir

“My alone is vast as water and connects with otherness. Where the thirst of knowledge once lived nests a hummingbird who can breathe underwater. Where I have bloomed let me decompose and generate another's growth.”
― Lidia Yuknavitch, Reading the Waves: A Memoir

“Sometimes I worry that men have fallen from a story we gave them that cannot hold any longer. But haven't we all? The old stories have collapsed in on themselves. Don't we need to invent new stories capable of carrying us?”
― Lidia Yuknavitch, Reading the Waves: A Memoir

“Most of the little shocks in life that mean anything to me amidst the gray hum of dull daily stuff of life are a murmuration of both joy and sorrow.”
― Lidia Yuknavitch, Reading the Waves: A Memoir

“I wonder what it looks like to a baby boy watching his mother walk straight into the raging ocean during a storm. Am I an image in his eyes yet, or something blurry and unresolved? I wonder what it is like to film your wife remembering her whole life, the deathwater, the lifewaters, walking into the sea. Did he understand yet that he had already become a lodestar?”
― Lidia Yuknavitch, Reading the Waves: A Memoir

“Never let anyone tell you how long your grief should last, or what to do with it.”
― Lidia Yuknavitch, Reading the Waves: A Memoir

“You are not more righteous if you are in love with your own scrap and struggle than you are with your own possibility.”
― Lidia Yuknavitch, Reading the Waves: A Memoir

“I was mourning my son's leaving before it ever happened because I carry loss inside my chest where a heart should be. My body is a lifedeath space.”
― Lidia Yuknavitch, Reading the Waves: A Memoir

“I did not deserve the poet's blow -- any blow, nor does anyone, ever. What I'm saying is that the space between my face and male rage was so familiar to me at that point in my life that I entered it again and again. Like a dare. My desire included a violence left incomplete, like a dangling sentence or plot. As if that was love. Move toward unresolvable trouble. That's how deeply someone who cannot locate a self worth loving drives down into self-destruction. At this point in the story, I was my father's daughter, and I didn't care if I lived or died.”
― Lidia Yuknavitch, Reading the Waves: A Memoir

“What do we owe our past versions of selves? At what point can we tell the truth about how it really felt, without worrying about how it looks or sounds?”
― Lidia Yuknavitch, Reading the Waves: A Memoir

“How many pretend mes have I conjured? I wonder. And toward what endgame? I'm not sure I had any idea why I was aggressively trying on identities, and I suspect no one else does, either, except that in our twenties and thirties (and possibly forever) we are trying to conjure fictions of a self and a life that might help us carry our own experiences.”
― Lidia Yuknavitch, Reading the Waves: A Memoir

“I can't believe I was worried if I was fat in that moment. That I was self-conscious about my American flab, my pendulous tits, my too-blond stand-out-everywhere-we-went hair, my transparent blue eyes, my I am not a young hottie with insufferable perky titties and a high-up ass like all the other dark-haired women Devin's eyes were drawn to. I looked like exactly what I was. A woman who should be dead from grief and rage but wasn't. A woman whose formidable intelligence and creativity were just getting born, only she had no fucking idea what to do with them. A woman in her twenties who had just been leveled by grief bigger than a body with a slightly sagging gut since I'd just carried both life and death, stepping out of an ocean from myth toward a man who thought death was a real place. One drink at a time. Leg, lip, soul over the edge.”
― Lidia Yuknavitch, Reading the Waves: A Memoir

“I know it's unseemly, but just like there are some women who can drink like a man, or women whose desire is unstoppable, there are women who can carry a death drive, a lust for danger, as aggressively as any man.

That was me.”
― Lidia Yuknavitch, Reading the Waves: A Memoir

“I am trying to learn how to stop carrying dead weight, what to put down in the good dirt. I know about the ways death leaves a black hole. I know about how people come to think they have to carry that hole in them their whole life, generation after generation.”
― Lidia Yuknavitch, Reading the Waves: A Memoir

“I am haunted because I am a woman, whatever that is, and the murdered woman is everywhere in art and life.”
― Lidia Yuknavitch, Reading the Waves: A Memoir

“My mother's family carries a history of small and large violences against women. But now we know that's a shared history. It's nobody's only story. It counts more people than it doesn't. And at this point, it's become a trope, whether we want to admit that or not. Pulling our actual bodies away from the trope is painful and exhausting as ever.”
― Lidia Yuknavitch, Reading the Waves: A Memoir