Month: March 2016

Language and Water

From The Chronology of Water:

I thought about starting this book with my childhood, the beginning of my life. But that’s not how I remember it. I remember things in retinal flashes. Without order. 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, 28

This is an amazing book so far. And I really appreciate this remembering.

What might it mean?

Do you write to figure out exactly how you feel about a subject?

Interviewer

No, I know how I feel. My feelings are the result of prejudices and convictions like everybody else’s. But I am interested in the complexity, the vulnerability of an idea. It is not “this is what I believe,” because that would not be a book, just a tract. A book is “this may be what I believe, but suppose I am wrong . . . what could it be?” Or, “I don’t know what it is, but I am interested in finding out what it might mean to me, as well as to other people.”

Toni Morrison

From An Interview with Toni Morrison: Toni Morrison, The Art of Fiction no. 134