Quotes from Maggie Nelson

I suppose it is possible that one day we will meet again and it will feel as if nothing ever happened between us.

For no one really knows what color is, where it is, even whether it is. (Can it die? Does it have a heart?) Think of a honeybee, for instance, flying into the folds of a poppy: it sees a gaping violet mouth, where we see an orange flower and assume that it's orange, that we're normal. 39.

Empirically speaking, we are made from star stuff. Why aren't we talking more about that? Materials never leave this world. They just keep recycling, recombining. That's what you kept telling me when we met--that in a real, material sense, what is made from where . I didn't have a clue what you were talking about, but I could see you burned for it. I wanted to be near that burning. I still don't understand, but at least now my fingers ride the lip.

Never in my life have I felt more prochoice than when I was pregnant. And never in my life have I understood more thoroughly, and been more excited about, a life that began at conception.

Do not, however, make the mistake of thinking that all desire is yearning.

220. Imagine someone saying, "Our fundamental situation is joyful." Now imagine believing it. 221. Or forget belief: imagine feeling, even if for a moment, that it were true.

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

This is generous, for to be close to her pain has always felt like a privilege to me, even though pain could be defined as that which we typically aim to avoid.

attempts to nail down "who we really are" most often serve as rhetorical pawns in unwinnable arguments fueled by competing agendas

I stopped smugly repeating 'Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly' and wondered anew, can everything be thought

We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate on them well," wrote Emerson. Is it true? If so, who can bear to believe it?

While the two words often arrive sutured together, I think it worthwhile to breathe some space between them, so that one might see "brutal honesty" not as a more forceful version of honesty itself, but as one possible use of honesty. One that doesn't necessarily lay truth barer by dint of force, but that actually overlays something on top of it—something that can get in its way. That something is cruelty.

I have been trying, for some time now, to find dignity in my loneliness. I have been finding this hard to do ... It is easier, of course, to find dignity in one's solitude. Loneliness is solitude with a problem.

94.—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.

There are people out there who get annoyed at the story that Djuna barnes, rather than identify as a lesbian, preferred to say that she 'just loved Thelma.' Gertrude Stein reputedly made similar claims, albeit not in those exact terms, about Alice. I get why it's politically maddening, but I've also always thought it a little romantic—the romance of letting an individual experience of desire take precedence over a categorical one.

14. I have enjoyed telling people that I am writing a book about blue without actually doing it.

Most people decide at some point that it is better … to be enthralled with what is impoverished or abusive than not to be enthralled at all and so to lose the condition of one's being and becoming.

Psychology forces everything we call love into the pathological or the delusional or the biologically explicable, that if that I was feeling wasn't love then I am forced to admit that I don't know what love is, or, more simply, that I loved a bad man.

A]fter all, what does it mean for pain to be 'memorable'? You're either in pain or you're not. And it isn't the pain that one forgets. It's the touching death part. As the baby might say to its mother, we might say to death: I forget you, but you remember me.

I invent her, then, as a woman emerging from the sea. A tall man meets here on the black sand. You've come back, he says. Can barely see her in the sea-light. They make love there, and become horses. As night grows black they become weeds

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.

She asks him quietly in the dark to tell her about the mother of everything and he did not know of whom she was speaking. She asked the volcano and the volcano belched great streams of wet ash. She lay her head down with fatigue and found her head on a pillow of ink. Upon waking she stretched her arms around the glob and found her fingers weren't even close to touching.

Oh, how often have I cursed those foolish pages of mine which made my youthful sufferings public property!" Goethe wrote years after the publication of The Sorrows of Young Werther.

You've punctured my solitude, I told you.