The Misfit's Manifesto Quotes

“You can be a drunk. You can be a survivor of abuse. You can be an ex-con. You can be a homeless person. You can lose all your money or your job or a husband or a wife, or the worst thing imaginable, a child. You can lose your marbles. You can be standing inside your own failure, a small sad stone in your throat, and still you are beautiful, your story is worth hearing, because you--you rare and phenomenal misfit--are the only one in the world who can tell the story the way that only you can.”
― Lidia Yuknavitch, The Misfit's Manifesto

“We misfits are the ones with the ability to enter grief. Death. Trauma. And emerge.”
― Lidia Yuknavitch, The Misfit's Manifesto

“What I learned from that intensely educational period of my life is that one kind of misfit is the person who suffers abuse or trauma and doesn't transcend it in the socially hoped-for way. We take a wrong turn or go deeper down. That's often looked at like a failure, but sometimes I wonder. I've learned things by taking the wrong turn or going down deeper that I could not have learned any other way.”
― Lidia Yuknavitch, The Misfit's Manifesto

“If you are one of those people who has the ability to make it down to the bottom of the ocean, the ability to swim the dark waters without fear, the astonishing ability to move through life's worst crucibles and not die, then you also have the ability to bring something back to the surface that helps others in a way that they cannot achieve themselves.”
― Lidia Yuknavitch, The Misfit's Manifesto

“It dawned on me that we have to breathe and to find reasons to stay alive on our own terms.”
― Lidia Yuknavitch, The Misfit's Manifesto

“I'm not the story you made of me.”
― Lidia Yuknavitch, The Misfit's Manifesto

“I 'passed' in every sphere of regular life I entered, but I entered those spheres less and less, and spent more and more time under the overpass.”
― Lidia Yuknavitch, The Misfit's Manifesto

“And maybe that's what a misfit is to me: someone with the ability to become increasingly dangerous, in incredibly loving ways, and not care what people think about it. [written by Jason Arias]”
― Lidia Yuknavitch, The Misfit's Manifesto

“When I say misfit, I’m talking about the fact that some of us just never found a way to fit in at all, from the get-go, all through our evolving lives, including in the present tense. I’m talking about how some of us experience that altered state of missing any kind of fitting in so profoundly that we nearly can’t make it in life. We serially flounder, or worse, we drown in our inabilities or mistakes, or even worse—since I’m old enough to understand that sometimes some of us don’t make it at all—we give up. Love and peace to the star stuff that carries those misfits we have lost too soon.”
― Lidia Yuknavitch, The Misfit's Manifesto

“The girl I lost became the girl I found inside stories where girls nearly die but then don’t, where girls with their hair on fire invent ways to save themselves, where girls who are incarcerated by family or violence or love or social norms break out of culture and into journeys no one has ever imagined before.”
― Lidia Yuknavitch, The Misfit's Manifesto