Quotes from Maggie Nelson

ag skriver ner allt det här i blått bläck, så att jag ska minnas att alla ord, inte bara vissa, är skrivna i vatten.

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.

In place of an exhausting autonomy, there is the blunt admittance of dependence, and its subsequent relief. 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.

I insisted that words did more than nominate.

the history of psychology does not exactly fill me with faith in its teleological progress. p. 204

Een vriend zegt dat gender voor hem net zoiets is als kleur. Gender en kleur delen een zekere ontologische onbepaaldheid: het klopt niet helemaal om te zeggen dat een voorwerp een kleur ís, noch om te zeggen dat het een kleur hééft. Ook de context verandert: 'alle katten zijn grijs', et cetera. Ook is kleur niet echt iets 'vrijwilligs'. Maar geen van deze formuleringen betekent dat het voorwerp in kwestie 'kleurloos' is.

tired of hearing that the most resistance one could muster in a Foucauldian universe was to work the trap one is inevitably in.

I want you to know, if you ever read this, there was a time when I would rather have had you by my side than any one of these words; I would rather have had you by my side than all the blue in the world.

Toxicity is now a question of degree, of acceptable parts per unit.

This is a simple story, but it spooks me, insofar as it reminds me that the eye is simply a recorder, with or without our will. Perhaps the same could be said of the heart. But whether there is a violence at work here remains undecided.

If a color could deliver hope, does it follow that it could also bring despair?

Ultramarine is not, of course, holy in and of itself. (What is?) It had to be made holy, by the wicked logic that renders the expensive sacred.

81. What I know: when I met you, a blue rush began. I want you to know, I no longer hold you responsible.

When I say "hope", I don't mean hope for anything in particular. I guess I just mean it's worth it to keep one's eyes open.

And who is to say this afterimage is not equally real? Indigo makes its stain not in the dyeing vat, but after the garment has been removed. It is the oxygen of the air that blues it.

I looked at dozens of apartments and when I entered the hallway of the one I moved into next I knew I could live there because it was cheap and the hallway was baby blue. My friends all told me it smelled as bad there as it did in the last one but I found a heads-up penny on the threshold

Daily I think about moving the most vulnerable objects to a "cool, dark place," but the truth is that I have little to no instinct for protection. Out of laziness, curiosity, or cruelty—if one can be cruel to objects—I have given them up to their diminishment.

That's my depression talking. It's not "me." 89. As if we could scrape the color off the iris and still see.

I am writing all this down in blue ink, so as to remember that all words, not just some, are written in water.

I felt the wild need for any or all of these people that night. Lying there alone, I began to feel - perhaps even to know - that I did not exist apart from their love and need of me. Of this latter I felt less sure, but it seemed possible, if the equation worked both ways. Falling asleep I thought, 'Maybe this, for me, is the hand of God.

Standing / apart from them one wonders / what on earth is a straight woman. / 'The only love I have ever felt / was for children and other women. / Everything else was just lust, pity, self-hatred, / pity, and lust.

218. As her witness, I can testify to no reason, no lesson. But I can say this: in watching her, sitting with her, helping her, weeping with her, touching her, and talking with her, I have seen the bright pith of her soul. I cannot tell you what it looks like, exactly, but I can say that I have seen it.

Babies grow in a helix of hope and fear.

I want the you no one else can see, the you so close the third person never need apply.