The Book of Joan Quotes

“We are what happens when the seemingly unthinkable celebrity rises to power. Our existence makes my eyes hurt.”
― Lidia Yuknavitch, The Book of Joan

“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, The Book of Joan

“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, The Book of Joan

“If we look at history - those of us who study it, who can remember it - we understand the reason why those who come to power swiftly, amid extreme national crises, are so dangerous: during such crises, we all turn into children aching for a good father. And the truth is, in our fear and despair, we'll take any father. Even if his furor is dangerous. It's as if humans can't understand how to function without a father. Perhaps especially then, we mistake heroic agency for its dark other.”
― Lidia Yuknavitch, The Book of Joan

“When they own languages, she thought, we are terrorists. When we own them, we are revolutionaries.”
― Lidia Yuknavitch, The Book of Joan

“Two things have always ruptured up and through hegemony: art and bodies.”
― Lidia Yuknavitch, The Book of Joan

“too—my god, what kind of brutal abomination dismisses the suffering of the majority of the world’s population as worth sustaining a tiny number of pinheaded elites—is proof enough that we don’t deserve a future. I”
― Lidia Yuknavitch, The Book of Joan

“We are what happens when the seemingly unthinkable celebrity rises to power. Our existence makes my eyes hurt. People are forever thinking that the unthinkable can't happen. If it doesn't exist in thought, then it can't exist in life. And then, in the blink of an eye, in a moment of danger, a figure who takes power from our weak desires and failures emerges like a rib from sand. Jean de Men. Some strange combination of a military dictator and a spiritual charlatan. A war-hungry mountebank. How stupidly we believe in our petty evolutions. Yet another case of something shiny that entertained us and then devoured us. We consume and become exactly what we create. In all times.”
― Lidia Yuknavitch, The Book of Joan

“To move violently and beautifully through skin, to enter matter-isn't that evolution's climax?”
― Lidia Yuknavitch, The Book of Joan

“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, The Book of Joan

“People are forever thinking that the unthinkable can't happen.”
― Lidia Yuknavitch, The Book of Joan

“Two things have always ruptured up and through hegemony: art and bodies. That is how art has preserved its toehold in our universe. Where there was poverty, there was also a painting someone stared at until it filled them with grateful tears. Where there was genocide, there was a song that refused to quiet. Where a planet was forsaken, there was someone telling a story with their last breath, and someone else carrying it like DNA, or star junk. Hidden matter.”
― Lidia Yuknavitch, The Book of Joan

“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, The Book of Joan

“The stars were never there for us -- we are not the reason for the night sky. The stars ”
― Lidia Yuknavitch, The Book of Joan

“As Earth's resources dwindle, technology is seized by those who kill best”
― Lidia Yuknavitch, The Book of Joan

“The first time, I was very much afraid. Then I was not. And never have been after”
― Lidia Yuknavitch, The Book of Joan

“It was the raging stubbornness of living organisms that simply would not give in.”
― Lidia Yuknavitch, The Book of Joan

“I don’t care which careful slice of history you choose to cling to, there is no part of being human that does not include the death spectacle: the resort to killing, through war or “justice” or revenge. Curious ways of practicing our humanity, we humans have.”
― Lidia Yuknavitch, The Book of Joan

“What I want to tell you is bigger than this beautiful piece of paper. But it's all I have.

This: you deserve so much better than me -- the dumb and useless body that's left of the story. You deserve a world better than this. You deserve whatever comes after human progress and its puny failures. You deserve the word "love," spoken over and over again and untethered from prior lexicons, an erotic and unbound universe, the dead light of stars yet aching to stitch your name across the night sky, the ocean waters singing your body hymn to shore day into night into day.”
― Lidia Yuknavitch, The Book of Joan

“On her side, there was a hatred there, too, if she was being honest with herself: for what we had made of ourselves, for the fictions we consistently chose that forced our own undoing; for our fear of otherness; for our inability to conquer ego, our seemingly tsunami-like thirst for never-ending consumption at the price of the planet.”
― Lidia Yuknavitch, The Book of Joan

“If we look at history - those of us who study it, who can remember it - we understand the reason why those who come to power swiftly, amid extreme national crises, are so dangerous: during such crises, we all turn into children aching for a good father. And the truth is, in our fear and despair, we'll take any father. Even if his furor is dangerous. It's as if humans can't understand how to function without a father. Perhaps especially then, we mistake heroic agency for its dark other.

When the current crises became global in scope, when the very ground underneath our feet and the skies meant to give us life turned on us, our desperation grew to cinematic proportions. We abandoned all previous fathers, who now seemed puny and impotent. Who was God, even, in the face of geocatastrophe? Dinosaurs never cared about a god.”
― Lidia Yuknavitch, The Book of Joan

“As Earth's resources dwindle, technology is seized by those who kill the best. CIEL rises more quickly than any empire ever known. Access to CIEL is restricted to the affluent. Those left on Earth are considered either collateral damage or raw material for the use of the living.”
― Lidia Yuknavitch, The Book of Joan

“Child armies were born quickly and organically, in the moment after the family, as a unit of social organization, broke down and lost its role within the social structure. At first their emergence seemed only expedient, only circumstantial: there were child porters, spies, messengers, scouts. It took only a little longer until there were child shields, and finally child soldiers, in every army. But then the world has always made violent use of children. The rhetoric of protecting children from war, shielding the most vulnerable from our most horrific truths, was always a hypocrisy designed to protect the illusions that adults carry that we care more about our children than we do about ourselves, until finally that pretense, too, fell.”
― Lidia Yuknavitch, The Book of Joan

“I've been thinking about how our desires and fears manifest in our bodies, and how our bodies, carrying these stories, resist the narratives our culture places on top of us, starting the moment we are born. It's our idiotic minds that overwrite everything. But the body has a point of view. It keeps its secrets. Makes its own stories. By any means necessary.”
― Lidia Yuknavitch, The Book of Joan

“I stopped caring about reason when we ascended and untethered ourselves from the grime and pulse of humanity, when we turned on ourselves and divided ourselves and proved what we had been all along: ravenous immoral consumers. Eaters of everything alive, as long as it sustained a story that gave us power over the struggling others.”
― Lidia Yuknavitch, The Book of Joan

“Men are among the loneliest creatures. They lose their mothers and cannot carry children, and have nothing to comfort themselves with but their vestigial cockular appendages. This is perhaps the reason they move ever warward when they are not moving fuckward. Now that the penis is defunct, a curling-up little insect, well, who can blame them for their behaviors?”
― Lidia Yuknavitch, The Book of Joan

“To have a story was to have a self.”
― Lidia Yuknavitch, The Book of Joan

“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, The Book of Joan

“we understand the reason why those who come to power swiftly, amid extreme national crises, are so dangerous: during such crises, we all turn into children aching for a good father. And the truth is, in our fear and despair, we’ll take any father. Even if his furor is dangerous. It’s as if humans can’t understand how to function without a father. Perhaps especially then, we mistake heroic agency for its dark other.”
― Lidia Yuknavitch, The Book of Joan

“The fastest way to drive living beings mad, then as today, is to confine them to a small, stimulus-less place and deprive them of any interaction with their species. We’ve taken the idea one more step. We can see one another. Hear one another. But we cannot reach one another, which creates a heightened longing impossible to name.”
― Lidia Yuknavitch, The Book of Joan