Quotes from Maggie Nelson

No less than GOD says she needs to put aside the sanity-producing magazine and pillow and start fucking her husband! Get over yourself and start fucking!

10. The most I want to do is show you the end of my index finger. Its muteness.

On the surface, it may have seemed as though your body was becoming more and more "male," mine becoming more and more "female." But that's not how it felt on the inside. On the inside, we were two human animals undergoing transformations beside each other, bearing each other loose witness. In other words, we were aging.

Sitting in my office before teaching a class on prosody, trying not to think about you, about my having lost you. But how can it be? How can it be? Was I too blue for you. Was I too blue. I look down at my lecture notes: Heártbréak is a spondee. Then I lay my head down on the desk and start to weep.—Why doesn't this help?

The chubby white suburban teenagers impersonating cops were precisely the kind of men to whom we would have preferred not to unload this story.

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

we fuck well because he is a passive top and I am an active bottom. I never said this out loud, but I thought it often.

one may have to undergo the same realizations, write the same notes in the margin, return to the same themes in one's work, relearn the same emotional truths, write the same book over and over again—not because one is stupid or obstinate or incapable of change, but because such revisitations constitute a life.

Las palabras no se parecen a las cosas que designan (Maurice Merleau-Ponty)

Do not tell lies and do not do what you hate, for all things are manifest in the sight of heaven.

Skin is soft; it takes what you do to it.

Well then, it is as you please. This is the dysfunction talking. This is the disease talking. This is how much I miss you talking. This is the deepest blue, talking, talking, always talking to you.

I suppose it is possible that one day we will meet again and it will feel as if nothing ever happened between us. This seems unimaginable, but the fact is that it happens all the time. "No whiteness (lost) is so white as the memory / of whiteness," wrote Williams. But one can lose the memory of whiteness, too.

Annie] Sprinkle is a many-gendered mother of the heart. And many-gendered mothers of the heart say: Just because you have enemies doea not mean you have to be paranoid. They insist, no matter the evidence marshaled against their insistence: There is nothing you can throw at me that I cannot metabolize, no thing impervious to my alchemy.

I think it possible that I have watched too many blue movies for it to have a lasting hold on me. If you grow accustomed to wall-to-wall, even the slightest shred of mystery or plot can become an agitation. Who cares why these people have found themselves in this banal, suburban tract home in Burbank? He is not a delivery man; she is not a bored housewife. They are not the stars---their orifices are. Let them open.