Quotes from Maggie Nelson

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 catastrophic situation. I never imagined it might apply to joy, too.

One thing they don't tell you bout the blues when you got 'em, you keep on fallin' 'cause there ain't no bottom," sings Emmylou Harris, and she may be right. Perhaps it would help to be told that there is no bottom, save, as they say, wherever and whenever you stop digging.

Nonetheless, as Billie Holiday knew, it remains the case that to see blue in deeper and deeper saturation is eventually to move toward darkness.

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. 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. Often I feel myself to be rocking between them (seasickness).

I would also like to cop easily to my abundant privilege - except 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.

And yet, at the same time, it feels disingenuous of me not to acknowledge that on a literal level, having a small body, a slender body, has long been related to my sense of self, even my sense of freedom.

Sara Ahmed Happiness is no protection, and certainly it is not a responsibility. The freedom to be happy restricts human freedom if you are not free to be not happy. But one can make of either freedom a habit, and only you know which you've chosen.

Generally speaking I do not hunt blue things down, nor do I pay for them. The blue things I treasure are gifts, or surprises in the landscape.

You must spend more time thinking about the divine.

The time for blithely asserting that sleeping with whomever you want however you want is going to jam its machinery is long past.

Middle aged women are such easy prey, like they're supposed to walk around with eyes averted, hanging their heads in shame at their wreckage. (Bellamy)

No more words from the field! Thus begins the slow slide back to my life, back to the plans I drew before the summer became the summer of wanting you

If you're looking for sexual tidbits as a female child, and the only ones that present themselves depict child rape or other violations...then your sexuality will form around that fact.

My whole body struggled to summon any utterable phrase. I knew you were a good animal, but felt myself to be standing before an enormous mountain, a lifetime of unwillingness to claim what I wanted, to ask for it. Now here you were, your face close to mine, waiting.

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. Angry and hurt as I may have been by his departure, his observation was undeniably correct. 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.

The mysteries of psychology pale in comparison, just as evolution strikes me as infinitely more spiritually profound than Genesis.

Its happiness has been of a more palpable and undeniable and unmitigated quality than any I've ever known. For it isn't just moments of happiness, which is all I thought we got. It's a happiness that spreads.

Can she help it if the unconscious is a sewer?

The Oblivion Seekers

I know we're still here, who knows for how long ablaze with our care, its ongoing song.

Joan Mitchell—abstract painter

Les Bluets, which she painted in 1973

How to explain that for some, or for some at some times, this irresolution is OK--desirable, even--whereas for others, or for others at some times, it stays a source of conflict or grief? 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?

It should be noted that the Tuareg do not call themselves Tuareg. Nor do they call themselves the blue people. They call themselves Imohag, which means "free men.