Quotes from Maggie Nelson

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.

We cannot read the darkness. We cannot read it. It is a form of madness, albeit a common one, that we try.

We spent hours and hours on the red couch, giggling, The happiness police are going to come and arrest us if we go on this way. Arrest us for our luck.

I never aimed to give you a talisman, an empty vessel to flood with whatever longing, dread, or sorrow happened to be the day's mood. I wrote it because I had something to say to you.

or stays up all night watching colored shadows drift across the walls? At times I have done all of these things, but not in service of science, nor of philosophy, not even of poetry.

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. If a man who thinks he is a king is mad, a king who thinks he is a king is no less so.

How clearly I have seen my condition, yet how childishly I have acted

mother and her entire family line are obsessed with skinniness as an indicator of physical, moral, and economic fitness.

Experienced builders and performers can attract up to thirty-three females to fuck per season if they put on a good enough show, have built up enough good blue in their bower, and have the contrast with the yellow straw down right. Less experienced builders sometimes don't attract any females at all. Each female mates only once. She incubates the eggs alone.

I have sometimes found myself wondering if the same principle applies in other realms— if seeing a particularly astonishing shade of blue, for example, or letting a particularly potent person inside you, could alter you irrevocably, just to have seen or felt it. In which case, how does one know when, or how, to refuse? How to recover?

No matter what happens to our bodies in our lifetimes..., they remain ours.

He is, after all, a very private person, who has told me more than once that being with me is like an epileptic with a pacemaker being married to a strobe light artist.

I have been trying, for some time now, to find dignity in my loneliness. I have been finding this hard to do. 72. It is easier, of course, to find dignity in one's solitude. Loneliness is solitude with a problem.

How often I've imagined the bubble of body and breath you and I made, even though by now I can hardly remember what you look like, I can hardly see your face.

The happiness police are going to come and arrest us if we go on this way. Arrest us for our luck.

181. 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 the dialogues Plato uses the word to refer to everything from an illness, its cause, its cure, a recipe, a charm, a substance, a spell, artificial color, and paint.

In one of my favorites of your drawings, 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 off their sticks.

We were dancing the way people dance when they are telling each other how they want to make love.

It's like she's pulling Post-it notes out of her hair and lecturing from them, one of my peers once complained about the teaching style of my beloved teacher Mary Ann Caws. ...Ditto Eileen Myles, who tells a great story about a student at UC San Diego once complaining that her lecturing style was like 'throwing a pizza at us.' My feeling is, you should be so lucky to get a pizza in the face from Eileen Myles, or a Post-it note plucked from the nest of Mary Ann Caws's hair.

I admit that I may have been lonely. I know that loneliness can produce bolts of hot pain, a pain which, if it stays hot enough for long enough, can begin to simulate, or to provoke -- take your pick -- an apprehension of the divine. (This ought to arouse our suspicions.)

Really, though, it's more than a perfect match, as that implies a kind of stasis. Whereas we're always moving, shape-shifting. No matter what we do, it always feels dirty without feeling lousy.

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 places in their midst.

I have been trying, for some time now, to find dignity in my loneliness. I have finding this hard to do. 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 me 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, it says, and so am I.

I am not yet sure how to sever the love from the lover without occasioning some degree of carnage.