Judging a book by its cover is so last season. Judging a book is EXTRA last season. But getting to know a book by its lines? Luring you to read a book by displaying all of its best lines on a blog post? It is exactly what we need in this era sponsored by Hinge and Tinder where the best lines (aka your three line bio) land you a date.
Here's The Book of Joan by Lidia Yuknavitch through its bestest lines.
"In the end for those of us who survived and ascended, who agreed to a finite life span in exchange for part of a life- our last wish didn't turn out to be power or money or property or fame. 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. The hunger for love replaced the hunger for god or science. The hunger for love became an opiate. In a world that had lost its ability to procreate, the story of love became paramount."
"It was a wish like the moth's wish for flame. It was a wish to fuck the sun. To be burned alive inside a story where our bodies could still want and do bodies want to do."
"In the beginning was the word, and the word became our bodies."
"And every time I see him, my mind cleaves, half shooting back to the past, half lodged in the present, shaking. What is a love story?"
"neither of us was without desire. His bloomed into a symbolic unending lasciviousness. Mine atrophied into an ache I'll take to my death."
"I burn. One might say we are desire's last stand"
"A fierce rage blooms in me. I think perhaps it is courage."
"What kind of brutal abomination dismisses the suffering of the majority of the world's population as worth sustaining a tiny number of pin-headed elites- is proof enough that we don't deserve a future."
"Everyone was going on like there wasn't a song ringing in her very bones, a song that came in epic waves, about the story of a girl saving the world. No. Not saving it. A something else. Loving it. But when she'd called it a long song it made everything worse. When she called it a love song, everyone wanted to know who the object of her affection was, what was she hiding."
"It feels like we'd been born into perpetual war, to be honest, and now we hover above our own past like impotent Greek Gods."
"And in her voice was a rage as old as Earth's canyons, cut by erosion and plate tectonics and the force of water. And yet her emotions were still those of a teen, unable to contain what raged inside her body."
"To admit that history was not something in the past but something you consciously step into."
"Its like we are stars in space. It's like space is the theatre and we are the bits of stardust and everything everywhere is the story."
"Burn my eyes from my head, burn us all to death. Get it over with. Finish it. Burn us into living matter again."
"My rage is changing. She is beginning to take on an epic death song. The song. In my head. It's coming back."
"Two things have always ruptured up and through hegemony: art and bodies. That is how art has preserved its toe-hold in our universe. Where there was poverty, there was also a painting someone stared at into 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."
"Who was God, even in the face of geo-catastrophe? Dinosaurs never cared about a god."
"But Joan knew one thing we never learned: to end war meant to end its maker, to marry creation and destruction rather than hold them in false opposition."
"When they own languages, she thought, we are terrorists. When we one them, we are revolutionaries."
"She put her hands down into the dirt. Sand. Oil. Molecules of air. History. Religion. Philosophy. Human relationships. Evolution."
"We always look up. What if everything that mattered was always down?"
"When you were very young, you used to think the sun was benevolent being. You thought it was an alien watching over us and keeping us warm. like the man in the mood, only better. You also thought the sun would kill God someday. It was quite a theory. For a kid."
"Be careful of what stories you tell yourself."
"Oh love.
Why couldn't you be real?
It isn't that love died. It's that we storied it poorly. We tried too hard to contain it and make it something to have and to hold.
Love was never meant to be less than an electrical impulse and the energy of matter, but that was no small thing. The study of life itself. Like in the universe, cosmic or as small as an atom. But we wanted it to be ours. Between us. For us. We made it small and private so that we'd be above all other living things. We made it a word, and then a story and then a reason to care more about ourselves than anything else on the planet. Our reasons to love more important than any others.
The stars were never there for us- we are not the reason for the night sky.
The stars are us."
"City of light or water or art. City of history and sprawling avenues spoking out from its landmarks, stretching out like the lines of an urban poem. City of rivers and streams threading through arrondissements and kissing tree-lined quays. Ghosts of cathedrals pulling faith in between the past and the present, rising from an island waterway, stretching to see a sister church. Old stone, older than stone making, stone giving cobblestoned streets pressed up against districts, once as distinct as the people on the planet; neighbourhoods like chapters from books, or what used to be books, turning and lifting now into some raw otherness. City of walking by day, and metros snaking and tunnelling underneath it all, some subterranean transit worming forward and backward having once teemed with human."
"You have to let go of the idea that you are a singular saviour or destroyer. Everything is matter. Everything is moved by and through energy. Bodies are miniature renditions of the entire universe. We are a collective mammalian energy source. That is what we have always been. What an epic error we made in misinterpreting it all."
"Nothing comes out of my mouth. I try to make my torso and arms into a sentence. I try to give her the words through my body. I want her to fall in love. I want her to fall in love so hard it hurts. I want that love to be something I've never even imagined. With everything left in me, I want to say something beautiful. Something unlike anything that's ever been said between two people- not in the history I've known, anyway."
"If I am dead, read this aloud to the dirt. It is a poem I memorised to stay alive when everything in me screamed otherwise.
wound
let fly the names like scattering birds,
let the story lines unbraid.
Forget your arms that were subtle wings,
forget your skin that was scale and fin,
forget your organs that were mammal bred,
see your death in the eye at birth.
Be rooted, beached, blown and carried.
Lie deeper than the womb will hold.
You are not only breath and bone
and you do not love alone."
The book of Joan is a story that reiterates the importance of resistance and the importance of young voices to lead it. It is a conscious, brave and much needed retelling of the Joan of Arc's story. It is a genre defying masterpiece that may very well rewire your brain. For the full review, check out my previous post about The book of Joan here.
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