Quotes from Maggie Nelson

I will always aspire to contain my shit as best I can, but I am no longer interested in hiding my dependencies in an effort to appear superior to those who are more visibly undone or aching.

I 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.

We have not yet heard enough, if anything, about the female gaze. About the scorch of 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.

Stop working against the world, I counseled myself. Love the one you're with. Love the color green. But I did not love the green, nor did I want to have to love it or pretend to love it. The most I can say is that I abided it.

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 of their sticks.

So long as we exalt artists as beautiful liars or as the world's most profound truth-tellers, we remain locked in a moralistic paradigm that doesn't even begin to engage art's most exciting provinces (139).

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.

When I was alive, I aimed to be a student not of longing but of light.

I think beauty neither obscures truth nor reveals it. Likewise, it leads neither toward justice nor away from it.

Exasperated, you finally said, 'You think I'm not worried too? Of course I'm worried. What I don't need is your worry on top of mine. I need your support

And what kind of madness is it anyway, to be in love with something constitutionally incapable of loving you back? 37. Are you sure -- one would like to ask -- that it cannot love you back?

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.

It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we have made that we exist," wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Girls are cruelest to themselves," observes Anne Carson in "The Glass Essay," her brilliant long poem about the ravages of female anger, loneliness, grief, and desire, giving us as poetic adage what any number of other fields give us as statistic.

a culture committed to bleeding the humanities to death, along with any other labors of love that don't serve the god of capital: the spectacle of someone who likes her pointless, pervers work and gets paid - even paid well - for it.

Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and as we pass through them they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus

As it turned out, my fears were unwarranted. Which isn't to say you haven't changed. But the biggest change of all has been a measure of peace. The peace is not total, but in the face of a suffocating anxiety, a measure of peace is no small thing.

You know so much about people from the second they open their mouths. Right away you might know that you might want to keep them out. That's part of the horror of speaking, of writing. There is nowhere to hide. When you try to hide, the spectacle can grow grotesque.

This is how much I miss you talking. This is the deepest blue, talking, talking, always talking to you.

I have been trying to place myself in a land of great sunshine, and abandon my will therewith.

I labor grimly on these sentences, wondering all the while if prose is but the gravestone marking the forsaking of wildness

I don't ever want to make the mistake of needing him as much as or more than he needs me. But there's no denying that sometimes, when we sleep together in the dark cavern of the bottom bunk, his big brother thrashing around on top, the white noise machine grinding out its fake rain, the green digital clock announcing every hour, Iggy's small body holds mine.

One problem with lyrical waxing, as Snediker has it, is that it often signals (or occasions) an infatuation with overarching concepts or figures that can run roughshod over the specificities of the situation at hand.