Quotes from Maggie Nelson

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.

the romance of letting an individual experience of desire take precedence over a categorical one.

Corollary habit: deriving the bulk of my self-wroth from a feeling of hypercompetence, an irrational but fervent belief in my near total self-reliance.

On April 20, 1970, the poet Paul Celan left his home in Paris, walked to a bridge over the River Seine, and jumped to his death. He left a biography of Hölderlin open on his desk, with the following words underlined: "Sometimes this genius goes dark and sinks down into the bitter well of his heart." The sentence does not end there. Celan chose not to underline the rest: "but mostly his apocalyptic star glitters wondrously.

Indeed, one of the gifts of genderqueer family making—and animal loving—is the revelation of caretaking as detachable from—and attachable to—any gender, any sentient being.

En ocasiones me preocupa que si no me siento conmovida por alguna cosa azul es porque estoy completamente desolada, o muerta. Algunas veces finjo mi entusiasmo. Otras, me temo que soy incapaz de comunicar lo profundo que es.

And I have long known that the moment of queer pride is a refusal to be shamed by witnessing the other as being ashamed of you.

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.

How could all the shreds of blue garbage bags stuck in brambles, or the bright blue tarps flapping over every shanty and fish stand in the world be, in essence, the fingerprints of god? I will try to explain this.

Silverman also contends that a baby's demands on the mother can be "very flattering to the mother's narcissism, since it attributes to her the capacity to satisfy her infant's lack, and so—by extension—her own.

two Christian princesses who were pursued by undesirable pagan lovers—lovers who professed to be unable to live without their beloveds' beautiful blue eyes. To rid herself of the unwanted attention, Medana supposedly plucked her eyes out and threw them at her suitor's feet; Triduana was slightly more inventive, and tore hers out with a thorn, then sent them to her suitor on a skewer.

I polled several friends to see how much time they would grant between "a blinding, bad time" and a life that has simply become a depressive waste; the consensus was around seven years. This bespeaks the generosity of my friends -- I imagine most Americans would give themselves a year, maybe two, before they castigated themselves into some form of yanking up the bootstraps.

But what goes on in you when you talk about colour as if it were a cure, when you have not yet stated your disease.

IN ONE OF his last psychoanalytic papers, D. W. Winnicott wrote: Fear of breakdown is the fear of a breakdown that has already been experienced.

It often happens that we treat pain as if it were the only real thing, or at least the most real thing: when it comes round, everything before it, around it, and, perhaps, in front of it, tends to seem fleeting, delusional.

And now, I think, we can say: a glass bead may flush the world with colour, but it alone makes no necklace. I wanted the necklace.

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

What if where I am is what I need?' Before you, I had always thought of this mantra as a means of making peace with a bummer or even a catastrophic situation. I never imagined it might apply to joy, too

Then again, perhaps [depression] does feel like a fire -- the blue core of it, not the theatrical orange crackling. I have spent a lot of time staring at the core in my own "dark chamber," and I can testify that is provides an excellent example of how blue gives way to darkness -- and then how, without warning, the darkness grows up into a cone of light.

For Mallarmé, the perfect book was one whose pages have never been cut, their mystery forever preserved, like a bird's folded wing, or a fan never opened.

It is absurd, Barthes says, to try to flee from language's assertive nature by 'adding to each sentence some little phrase of uncertainty, as if anything that came out of language could make language tremble.' 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.

Desire was a sharpness, a tear in the static of everyday life... it delivers not an ache, but a sudden state of grace.

Why is the sky blue?" - A fair enough question, and one I have learned the answer to several times. Yet every time I try to explain it to someone or remember it to myself, it eludes me. Now I like to remember the question alone, as it reminds me that my mind is essentially a sieve, that I am mortal.

Look for yourself, and ask not what has been real and what has been false, but what has been bitter, and what has been sweet.