Top 100 Maggie Nelson Quotes
#1. Maggie Nelson cuts through our culture's prefabricated structures of thought and feeling with an intelligence whose ferocity is ultimately in the service of love. No piety is safe, no orthodoxy, no easy irony. The scare quotes burn off like fog.
Ben Lerner
#2. In The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson turns 'making the personal public' into a romantic, intellectual wet dream. A gorgeous book, inventive, fearless, and full of heart.
Kim Gordon
#3. So far as I can tell, most worthwhile pleasures on this earth slip between gratifying another and gratifying oneself. Some would call that an ethics.
Maggie Nelson
#4. 96. For a prince of blue is a prince of blue because keeps 'a pet sorrow, a blue-devil familiar, that goes with him everywhere' (Lowell, 1870) This is how a prince of blue becomes a pain devil.
Maggie Nelson
#5. Life is a train of moods like a string of beads and as we pass through them they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in it's focus. To find oneself trapped in any one bead, no matter what it's hue, can be deadly.
Maggie Nelson
#6. 88. Like many self-help books, The Deepest Blue is full of horrifyingly simplistic language and some admittedly good advice. Somehow the women in the book all learn to say: That's my depression talking. It's not "me." 89. As if we could scrape the color off the iris and still see. 90.
Maggie Nelson
#7. 20. Fucking leaves everything as it is. Fucking may in no way interfere with the actual use of language. For it cannot give it any foundation either. It leaves everything as it is.
Maggie Nelson
#8. 58. "Love is something so ugly that the human race would die out if lovers could see what they were doing" (Leonardo da Vinci).
Maggie Nelson
#9. But now you are talking as if love were a consolation. Simone Weil warned otherwise. "Love is not consolation," she wrote. "It is light." 240.
Maggie Nelson
#10. 53. 'We mainly suppose the experiential quality to be an intrinsic quality of the physical object'-this is the so-called systematic illusion of color. Perhaps it is also that of love. But I am not willing to go there-not just yet. I believed in you.
Maggie Nelson
#11. You know so much about people from the second they open their mouths. Right away you might know that you might want to keep them out. That's part of the horror of speaking, of writing. There is nowhere to hide. When you try to hide, the spectacle can grow grotesque.
Maggie Nelson
#12. We struggled to understand how a contract with the so-called secular state could mandate some kind of spiritual ritual.
Maggie Nelson
#13. As it turned out, my fears were unwarranted. Which isn't to say you haven't changed. But the biggest change of all has been a measure of peace. The peace is not total, but in the face of a suffocating anxiety, a measure of peace is no small thing.
Maggie Nelson
#14. [A]fter all, what does it mean for pain to be 'memorable'? You're either in pain or you're not. And it isn't the pain that one forgets. It's the touching death part. As the baby might say to its mother, we might say to death: I forget you, but you remember me.
Maggie Nelson
#15. We don't get to choose what or whom we love, I want to say. We just don't get to choose.
Maggie Nelson
#16. Unlike the close-knit, DIY queer scene you were once at the center of in San Francisco, the queer scene in LA can feel like everything else in LA: partitioned by traffic and freeways, oppressively cliquish and bewilderingly diffuse at the same time, hard to fathom, to see.
Maggie Nelson
#17. If he hadn't lied to you, he would have been a different person than he is.' She is trying to get me to see that although I thought I loved this man very completely for exactly who he was, I was in fact blind to the man he actually was, or is.
Maggie Nelson
#18. And if 'saturation' means that one simply could not absorb or contain one single drop more, why does 'saturation' not bring with it a connotation of satisfaction, either in concept, or in experience?
Maggie Nelson
#19. As if keening on your knees
were somehow obscene
As if there were a control
so marvelous
you could teach it
to eat pain.
Maggie Nelson
#20. I have been trying, for some time now, to find dignity in my loneliness. I have been finding this hard to do. 72.
Maggie Nelson
#21. Oh, how often have I cursed those foolish pages of mine which made my youthful sufferings public property! Goethe wrote years after the publication of The Sorrows of Young Werther.
Maggie Nelson
#22. But why bother with diagnoses at all, if a diagnosis is but a restatement of the problem?
Maggie Nelson
#23. There is nothing you can throw at me that I cannot metabolize, no thing impervious to my alchemy.
Maggie Nelson
#24. How does one get across the fact that the best way to find out how people feel about their gender or their sexuality - or anything else, really - is to listen to what they tell you, and to try to treat them accordingly, without shellacking over their version of reality with yours?
Maggie Nelson
#25. But really justice has no coordinates, no teleology.
Maggie Nelson
#26. [He] told me more than once that being with me is like an epileptic with a pacemaker being married to a strobe light artist.
Maggie Nelson
#27. (Visibility makes possible, but it also disciplines: disciplines gender, disciplines genre.)
Maggie Nelson
#28. Pharmakon means drug, but as Jacques Derrida and others have pointed out, the word in Greek famously refuses to designate whether poison or cure. It holds both in the bowl.
Maggie Nelson
#29. It will not say, 'Isn't X beautiful?' Such demands are murderous to beauty.
Maggie Nelson
#30. Am I sitting here now, months later, in Los Angeles, writing all this down, because I want my life to matter? Maybe so. But I don't want it to matter more than others.
I want to remember, or to learn, how to live as if it matters, as if they all matter, even if they don't.
Maggie Nelson
#31. 185. Perhaps this is why writing all day, even when the work feels arduous, never feels to me like "a hard day's work." Often it feels more like balancing two sides of an equation - occasionally quite satisfying, but essentially a hard and passing rain. It, too, kills the time.
Maggie Nelson
#32. And we have not yet heard enough, if anything, about the female gaze. About the scorch of it, with the eyes staying in the head.
Maggie Nelson
#33. But if I were honest, or if I were at least to bump into the limits of my honesty, I would have to admit that I knew exactly how this love would end from the moment it began. The loss was probably before it was possible.
Maggie Nelson
#34. In life and art, there are distinctions to be made between what an act of cruelty consists of.
Maggie Nelson
#35. Misogyny, when expressed or explored by men, remains a timeless classic.
Maggie Nelson
#36. This is the dysfunction talking. This is the disease talking. This is how much I miss you talking. This is the deepest blue, talking, talking, always talking to you.
Maggie Nelson
#38. For no one really knows what color is, where it is, even whether it is. (Can it die? Does it have a heart?) Think of a honeybee, for instance, flying into the folds of a poppy: it sees a gaping violet mouth, where we see an orange flower and assume that it's orange, that we're normal. 39.
Maggie Nelson
#39. To devote yourself to someone else's pussy can be a means of devoting yourself to your own.
Maggie Nelson
#40. I beheld and still behold in anger and agony the eagerness of the world to throw piles of shit on those of us who want to savage or simply cannot help but savage the norms that so desperately need savaging.
Maggie Nelson
#41. You, reader, are alive today, reading this, because someone once adequately policed your mouth exploring.
Maggie Nelson
#42. One problem with lyrical waxing, as Snediker has it, is that it often signals (or occasions) an infatuation with overarching concepts or figures that can run roughshod over the specificities of the situation at hand.
Maggie Nelson
#43. Evolution strikes me as infinitely more spiritually profound than Genesis.
Maggie Nelson
#44. 199. For to wish to forget how much you loved someone - and then, to actually forget - can feel, at times, like the slaughter of a beautiful bird who chose, by nothing short of grace, to make a habitat of your heart.
Maggie Nelson
#45. I don't think there's any formula for what makes great art.
Maggie Nelson
#46. I was so happy renting in New York City for so long because renting - or at least the way I rented, which involved never lifting a finger to better my surroundings - allows you to let things literally fall apart all around you. Then, when it gets to be too much, you just move on.
Maggie Nelson
#47. I am trying to talk about what blue means, or what it means to me, apart from meaning.
Maggie Nelson
#48. I told you I wanted to live in a world in which the antidote to shame is not honor, but honesty.
Maggie Nelson
#49. We have not yet heard enough, if anything, about the female gaze. About the scorch of it.
Maggie Nelson
#50. I will always aspire to contain my shit as best I can, but I am no longer interested in hiding my dependencies in an effort to appear superior to those who are more visibly undone or aching.
Maggie Nelson
#51. I think you overestimate the maturity of adults, he wrote me in his final letter, a letter he sent only after I'd broken down and written him first, after a year of silence.
Maggie Nelson
#52. Most people decide at some point that it is better ... to be enthralled with what is impoverished or abusive than not to be enthralled at all and so to lose the condition of one's being and becoming.
Maggie Nelson
#54. Mostly I have felt myself becoming a servant of sadness. I am still looking for the beauty in that.
Maggie Nelson
#55. But the tacit undercurrent of her argument, as I felt it, was that Gallop's maternity had rotted her mind - besotted it with the narcissism that makes one think that an utterly ordinary experience shared by countless others is somehow unique, or uniquely interesting.
Maggie Nelson
#56. Mother and her entire family line are obsessed with skinniness as an indicator of physical, moral, and economic fitness.
Maggie Nelson
#57. 95. But please don't write again to tell me how you have woken up weeping. I already know how you are in love with your weeping.
Maggie Nelson
#58. I feel I can give you everything without giving myself away, I whispered in your basement bed. If one does one's solitude right, this is the prize.
Maggie Nelson
#59. [Yet] dependence is scorned even in intimate relationships, as though dependence were incompatible with self-reliance rather than the only thing that makes it possible.
Maggie Nelson
#60. The question up for debate between Socrates and Phaedrus is whether the written word kills memory or aids it--whether it cripples the mind's power, or whether it cures it of its forgetfulness.
Maggie Nelson
#62. This slice of truth, offered in the final hour, ended up beginning a new chapter of my adulthood, the one in which I realized that age doesn't necessarily bring anything with it, save itself. The rest is optional.
Maggie Nelson
#63. I feel high on the knowledge that I can talk as much as I want to, as quickly as I want to, in any direction that I want to, without anyone overtly rolling her eyes at me or suggesting I go to speech therapy. I'm not saying this is good pedagogy. I am saying that its pleasures are deep.
Maggie Nelson
#64. My writing is riddled with such tics of uncertainty. I have no excuse or solution, save to allow myself the tremblings, then go back in later and slash them out. In this way I edit myself into a boldness that is neither native nor foreign to me.
Maggie Nelson
#65. How people are often merciless
on those they love the most
Maggie Nelson
#66. To align oneself with the real while intimating that others are at play, approximate, or in imitation can feel good. But any fixed claim on realness, especially when it is tied to an identity, also has a finger in psychosis.
Maggie Nelson
#67. [..] two Popsicles are talking to each other. One accuses, "You're more interested in fantasy than reality". The other responds, "I'm interested in the reality of my fantasy." Both of the Popsicles are melting of their sticks.
Maggie Nelson
#68. The mainstream thrust of anti-intellectualism, as it stands today, characterizes thinking itself as an elitist activity.
Maggie Nelson
#69. Why should I feel lonely? is not our planet in the Milky Way? (Thoreau).
Maggie Nelson
#70. The moment of queer pride is a refusal to be shamed by witnessing the other as being ashamed of you.
Maggie Nelson
#71. The freedom to be happy restricts human freedom if you are not free to be not happy.
Maggie Nelson
#72. If I were today on my deathbed, I would name my love of the color blue and making love with you as two of the sweetest sensations I knew on this earth.
Maggie Nelson
#73. But while the color may sap appetite in the most literal sense, it feeds it in others.
Maggie Nelson
#74. In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.
Maggie Nelson
#75. 92. Eventually I confess to a friend some details about my weeping - its intensity, its frequency. She says (kindly) that she thinks we sometimes weep in front of a mirror not to inflame self-pity, but because we want to feel witnessed in our despair.
Maggie Nelson
#76. Like many self-help books, The Deepest Blue is full of horrifyingly simplistic language and some admittedly good advice. Somehow the women in the book learn to say: That's my depression talking. It's not "me."
As if we could scrape the color off the iris and still see.
Maggie Nelson
#77. Even identical genital acts mean very different things to different people. This is a crucial point to remember, and also a difficult one. It reminds us that there is difference right where we may be looking for, and expecting, communion.
Maggie Nelson
#78. But whatever sameness I've noted in my relationships with women is not the sameness of Woman, and certainly not the sameness of parts. Rather, it is the shared, crushing understanding of what it means to live in a patriarchy.
Maggie Nelson
#79. 102. After my friend's accident I take care of her. It is always taking care, but it is difficult, because at times to take care of her is also to cause her pain.
Maggie Nelson
#80. The half-circle of blinding turquoise ocean is this love's primal scene. That this blue exists makes my life a remarkable one, just to have seen it. To have seen such beautiful things. To find oneself placed in their midst. Choiceless. I returned there yesterday and stood again upon the mountain.
Maggie Nelson
#81. [..] a culture committed to bleeding the humanities to death, along with any other labors of love that don't serve the god of capital: the spectacle of someone who likes her pointless, pervers work and gets paid - even paid well - for it.
Maggie Nelson
#82. That the notion of privilege as something to which one could "easily cop," as in "cop to once and be done with," is ridiculous. Privilege saturates, privilege structures.
Maggie Nelson
#83. Perhaps I had inadvertently brushed up against the Buddhist axiom, that enlightenment is the ultimate disappointment.
Maggie Nelson
#84. To take a breath of water: does the thought panic or excite you?
Maggie Nelson
#85. But this time, so far as I can tell, my mother has not made her husband her desire incarnate, though she does love him very much. And for his part, so far as I can tell, he doesn't try to talk her out of her self-deprecation, nor does he abet it. He simply loves her. I am learning from him.
Maggie Nelson
#87. Art to me is not precious enough that I feel territorial about what the word gets applied to. Conversations about what counts as art and what doesn't doesn't captivate my attention very much.
Maggie Nelson
#88. The Oblivion Seekers, a collection one critic has described as "one of the strangest human documents that a woman has given to the world.
Maggie Nelson
#89. And certainly there are many speakers whom I'd like to see do more trembling, more unknowing, more apologizing.
Maggie Nelson
#90. Is to be in love with blue, then, to be in love with a disturbance? Or is the love itself the disturbance? And what kind of madness is it anyway, to be in love with something constitutionally incapable of loving you back?
Maggie Nelson
#91. I have heard that this pain can be converted, as it were, by accepting "the fundamental impermanence of all things." This acceptance bewilders me: sometimes it seems an act of will; at others, of surrender.
Maggie Nelson
#92. So long as we exalt artists as beautiful liars or as the world's most profound truth-tellers, we remain locked in a moralistic paradigm that doesn't even begin to engage art's most exciting provinces (139).
Maggie Nelson
#93. Attempts to nail down "who we really are" most often serve as rhetorical pawns in unwinnable arguments fueled by competing agendas
Maggie Nelson
#94. 229. I am writing all this down in blue ink, so as to remember that all words, not just some, are written in water.
Maggie Nelson
#95. I don't ever believe in violence as a kind of medicine.
Maggie Nelson
#96. That's enough. You can stop now: the phrase Sedgwick said she longed to hear whenever she was suffering. (Enough hurting, enough showing off, enough achieving, enough talking, enough trying, enough writing, enough living.)
Maggie Nelson
#97. Sometimes one has to know something many times over. Sometimes one forgets, and then remembers. And then forgets, and then remembers. And then forgets again.
Maggie Nelson
#98. The time for blithely asserting that sleeping with whomever you want however you want is going to jam its machinery is long past.
Maggie Nelson
#99. Barthes found the exit to this merry-go-round by reminding himself that "it is language which is assertive, not he." It is absurd, Barthes says, to try to flee from language's assertive nature by "add[ing] to each sentence some little phrase of uncertainty,
Maggie Nelson
#100. I invent her, then, as a woman emerging from the sea.
A tall man meets here on the black sand.
You've come back, he says.
Can barely see her in the sea-light.
They make love there, and become horses.
As night grows black they become weeds
Maggie Nelson
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