Quotes from Maggie Nelson

What if where I am is what I need?

For the mainstream thrust of anti-intellectualism, as it stands today, characterizes thinking itself as an elitist activity.

102. After my friend's accident I take care of her. It is always taking care, but it is difficult, because at times to take care of her is also to cause her pain.

It will not say, 'Isn't X beautiful?' Such demands are murderous to beauty.

How does one get across the fact that the best way to find out how people fell about their gender or 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?

Silverman also contends that a baby's demands on the mother can be "very flattering to the mother's narcissism, since it attributes to her the capacity to satisfy her infant's lack, and so—by extension—her own. Since most women in our culture are egoically wounded, the temptation to bathe in the sun of this idealization often proves irresistible.

Poor marriage! Off we went to kill it (unforgivable). Or reinforce it (unforgivable).

In other words, she wanted it both ways. There is much to be learned from wanting something both ways.

But the tacit undercurrent of her argument, as I felt it, was that Gallop's maternity had rotted her mind—besotted it with the narcissism that makes one think that an utterly ordinary experience shared by countless others is somehow unique, or uniquely interesting.

It's the binary of normative/transgressive that's unsustainable, along with the demand that anyone live a life that's all one thing.

My relatives all say Jane wanted to change the world Then they add None of us can

As her time grew near, your brother took her in. His family situation was under strain, but at least she had a bed there, her own room. It was almost good enough. But really none of it was good enough, even though it was better than many get. When she began to lose consciousness, your brother had her moved to a local hospice; you flew there in the dead of night, desperate to get there in time, so that she wouldn't die alone.

Even identical genital acts mean very different things to different people. This is a crucial point to remember, and also a difficult one. It reminds us that there is difference right where we may be looking for, and expecting, communion.

There is simply no way that a year from now you're going to feel the way you feel today", a different therapist said to me last year at this time. But though I have learned to act as if I feel differently, the truth is that my feelings haven't really changed.

Drinking when you are depressed is like throwing kerosene on a fire", I read in another self-help book at the bookstore. What depression felt like a fire? I think, shoving the book back on the shelf.

I feel at once the need to die and be reborn one thousand years ago.

100. It often happens that we count our days, as if the act of measurement made us some kind of promise. But really this is like hoisting a harness onto an invisible horse. "There is simply no way that a year from now you're going to feel the way you feel today," a different therapist said to me last year at this time. But though I have learned to act as if I feel differently, the truth is that my feelings haven't really changed.

The Oblivion Seekers, a collection one critic has described as "one of the strangest human documents that a woman has given to the world.

I do not know the reason for this blue pussy, meant to convey both divine bewilderment and revelation. But I do feel that its color is right. For blue has no mind. It is not wise, nor does it promise any wisdom. It is beautiful, and despite what the poets and philosophers and theologians have said, I think beauty neither obscures truth nor reveals it. Likewise, it leads neither towards justice nor away from it. It is pharmakon. It radiates.

But this time, so far as I can tell, my mother has not made her husband her desire incarnate, though she does love him very much. And for his part, so far as I can tell, he doesn't try to talk her out of her self-deprecation, nor does he abet it. He simply loves her. I am learning from him.

88. 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 all learn to say: That's my depression talking. It's not "me." 89. As if we could scrape the color off the iris and still see. 90.

It is easier, of course, to find dignity in one's solitude. Loneliness is solitude with a problem. Can blue solve the problem, or can it at least keep my company within it? --No, not exactly. It cannot love me that way; it has no arms. But sometimes I do feel its presence to be a sort of wink -- Here you are again, it says, and so am I.

and I am missing you in the way that spreads. I'm trying to wear my freedom like an amulet, make it something I'll never forget.

But now you are talking as if love were a consolation. Simone Weil warned otherwise. "Love is not consolation," she wrote. "It is light." 240.