Quotes from Maggie Nelson

After years of feeling like the dutiful daughter, now I just felt like a complete shit.

You might even say that it is the business of the eye to make colored forms out of what is essentially shimmering. This is how we "get around" in the wirld. Some might also call it the source of our suffering.

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.

The witnesses and detectives fold and unfold this towel many times, always with a certain solemnity and formality, as if it were a flag. But the flag of what country, I cannot say. Some dark crescent of land, a place where suffering is essentially meaningless, where the present collapses into the past without warning, where we cannot escape the fates we fear the most, where heavy rains come and wash bodies up and out of their grave, where grief lasts forever and its force never fades

It's painful for me that I wrote a whole book calling into question identity politics, only then to be constituted as a token of lesbian identity. Either people didn't really read the book, or the commodification of identity politics is so strong that whatever you write, even when it's explicitly opposed to that politics, gets taken up by that machinery.

It seems to me crucial — even ethically crucial — to treat with caution any rhetoric that purports to have all ethical goodness on its side.

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?

About parenthood and BDSM) Note that a difficulty in shifting gears, or a struggle to find the time, is not the same thing as an ontological either/or.

Love is not consolation," she wrote. "It is light." All right then, let me try to rephrase. When I was alive, I aimed to be a student not of longing but of light.

It it easier, of course, to find dignity in one's solitude. Loneliness is solitude with a problem. Can blue solve the problem, or can it at least keep my company within it? - No, not exactly. It cannot love me that way; it has no arms. But sometimes I do feel its presence to be a sort of wink - Here you are again, and so am I.

The reparative turn, as applied to art, is in many ways a continuation of the orthopedic aesthetic, with the difference being that the twentieth-century model imagined the audience as numb, constricted, and in need of being awakened and freed (hence, an aesthetics of shock), whereas the twenty-first-century model presumes the audience to be damaged, in need of healing, aid, and protection (hence, an aesthetics of care).

Uno de los hombres pregunta «¿por qué azul?». La gente me pregunta eso con frecuencia. Nunca sé cómo responder. No podemos elegir qué o a quién amamos, quisiera decir. Simplemente no elegimos.

I am getting the bad feeling that my friends are growing tired of me. I am growing tired of me, too.

How does one get across the fact that the best way to find out how people feel about their gender or 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?

Nothing stays avant-garde forever; you have to keep moving.

We may become more used to jumping into flight, but that doesn't mean we have done with all perches.

I'm not on my way anywhere, Harry sometimes tells inquirers. How to explain, in a culture frantic for resolution, that sometimes the shit stays messy?

This is one of the things I've learned about happiness: when you feel it, it's good to say so. That way, if and when you say later in depression or despair, "I've just never been happy," there will be a trail of audible testimony in your wake indicating otherwise.

For blue has no mind. It is not wise, nor does it promise any wisdom. It is beautiful, and despite what the poets and philosophers and theologians have said, I think beauty neither obscures truth nor reveals it. Likewise, it leads neither towards justice nor away from it. It is pharmakon. It radiates.

As we think, we might remember that it matters not only with whom and what we choose to think; it also matters what spirit we choose to think with.

Nothing you say can fuck up the space for God.

It is always taking care, but it is difficult, because at times to take care of her is also to cause her pain.

We sometimes weep in front of the mirror not to inflame self-pity, but because we want to feel witnessed in our despair.

Performativity has to do with repetition, very often with the repetition of oppressive and painful gender norms to force them to resignify. This is not freedom, but a question of how to work the trap that one is inevitably in.