Each day I begin the page the same. What is it to lose love. And each day I look at the sentence and understand completely the overbearing pathos, the cliche. I am thinking of the way sentences die, or the way someone dies and a sentence cannot hold the weight, of the way language gives way again and again, despite our dreadful longing to get it right … I wrote just now of men and women, of a certain kind of love, and I have not the faintest idea of what I am saying. It is at moments such as this that I believe with every molecule of existence, with all the ridiculous folds of the brain, that language is a parlor trick, a trompe l’oeille that makes us risk lived experience for imagination. To think that a word could hold anything on its small back. What a farce. What a cruel joke. I am an idiot and my hands are addicted.
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— Lidia Yuknavitch, “Siberia”