Quotes from Maggie Nelson

125. Of course, you could just take off the blindfold and say, 'I think this game is stupid and I'm not playing it anymore.' And it must also be admitted that hitting the wall or wandering off in the wrong direction or tearing off the blindfold is as much a part of the game as is pinning the tail on the donkey.

Evolution strikes me as infinitely more spiritually profound than Genesis.

Sometimes one has to know something many times over. Sometimes one forgets, and then remembers. And then forgets, and then remembers. And then forgets again.

In life and art, there are distinctions to be made between what an act of cruelty consists of.

We're all human beings with bodily needs living within a system. We don't need to prove that we're not a part of the fabric of the culture in order to want to change it.

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.

Art to me is not precious enough that I feel territorial about what the word gets applied to. Conversations about what counts as art and what doesn't doesn't captivate my attention very much.

I don't ever believe in violence as a kind of medicine.

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

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

You pass as a guy; I, as pregnant. Our waiter cheerfully tells us about his family, expresses delight in ours. On the surface, it may have seemed as though your body was becoming more and more "male," mine, 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.

And we have not yet heard enough, if anything, about the female gaze. About the scorch of it, with the eyes staying in the head.

I beheld and still behold in anger and agony the eagerness of the world to throw piles of shit on those of us who want to savage or simply cannot help but savage the norms that so desperately need savaging.

Do not, however, make the mistake of thinking that all desire is yearning. "We love to contemplate blue, not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it," wrote Goethe, and perhaps he is right. But I am not interested in longing to live in a world in which I already live. I don't want to yearn for blue things, and God forbid for any "blueness." Above all, I want to stop missing you.

20. Fucking leaves everything as it is. Fucking may in no way interfere with the actual use of language. For it cannot give it any foundation either. It leaves everything as it is.

The freedom to be happy restricts human freedom if you are not free to be not happy.

58. "Love is something so ugly that the human race would die out if lovers could see what they were doing" (Leonardo da Vinci).

If I were today on my deathbed, I would name my love of the color blue and making love with you as two of the sweetest sensations I knew on this earth.

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.

Like many self-help books, The Deepest Blue is full of horrifyingly simplistic language and some admittedly good advice. Somehow the women in the book learn to say: That's my depression talking. It's not "me." As if we could scrape the color off the iris and still see.

That's enough. You can stop now: the phrase Sedgwick said she longed to hear whenever she was suffering. (Enough hurting, enough showing off, enough achieving, enough talking, enough trying, enough writing, enough living.)

You, reader, are alive today, reading this, because someone once adequately policed your mouth exploring.

At times I fake my enthusiasm. At others, I fear I am incapable of communicating the depth of it.

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.