The Book of Joan
Lidia Yuknavitch
Top 10 Best Quotes
“We are what happens when the seemingly unthinkable celebrity rises to power. Our existence makes my eyes hurt.”
“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?”
“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.”
“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”
“When they own languages, she thought, we are terrorists. When we own them, we are revolutionaries.”
“Two things have always ruptured up and through hegemony: art and bodies.”
“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.”
“To move violently and beautifully through skin, to enter matter-isn't that evolution's climax?”
“People are forever thinking that the unthinkable can't happen.”
“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.”
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Book Keywords:
celebrity, belief, art, dictator, bodies, hegemony, power, death
