Quotes from Maggie Nelson

Most of my writing usually feels to me like a bad idea, which makes it hard for me to know which ideas feel bad because they have merit, and which ones feel bad because they don't

Everywhere I go as a writer—especially if I'm in drag as a "memoirist"—such fears seem to be first and foremost on people's minds. People seem hungry, above all else, for permission, and a guarantee against bad consequences. The first, I try to give; the second is beyond my power.)

The problem is, of course, that art typically requires an audience, which loops us right back to the problem of observing actions and losing ourselves in consideration of their imagined form.

Fear of breakdown is the fear of a breakdown that has already been experienced [...} It's only lately that I've realized that Winnicott is not suggesting that breakdowns do not recut. Now I see that he may be suggesting just the opposite: that a fear of breakdown in our past may be precisely what causes it to repeat in our future

Write the things which thou hast seen, and the things which are, and the things which shall be hereafter. A red part

You're the only one who knows when you're using things to protect yourself and keep your ego together and when you're opening and letting things fall apart, letting the world come as it is—working with it rather than struggling against it. You're the only one who knows. And the thing is, even you don't always know.

72. 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 me 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.

I don't even want to talk about "female sexuality" until there is a control group. And there never will be.

The point wasn't that if the outer world were schooled appropriately re: the characters' preferred pronouns, everything would be right as rain. Because if the outsiders called the characters "he", it would be a different kind of he. Words change depending on who speaks them; there is no cure.

But while the color may sap appetite in the most literal sense, it feeds it in others.

But why bother with diagnoses at all, if a diagnosis is but a restatement of the problem?

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.

I am trying to talk about what blue means, or what it means to me, apart from meaning.

She is trying to get me to see that although I thought I loved this man very completely for exactly who he was, I was in fact blind to the man he actually was, or is.

The joke of evolution is that it is a teleology without a point, that we, like all animals, are a project that issues in nothing. But is there really such a thing as nothing, as nothingness? I don't know. I know we're still here, who knows for how long, ablaze with our care, its ongoing song.

So far as I can tell, most worthwhile pleasures on this earth slip between gratifying another and gratifying oneself.

This slice of truth, offered in the final hour, ended up beginning a new chapter of my adulthood, the one in which I realized that age doesn't necessarily bring anything with it, save itself. The rest is optional. Bear

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.

Jag skriver ner allt det här i blått bläck, så att jag ska minnas att alla ord, inte bara vissa, är skrivna i vatten.

The tepid 'there must be a reason for it' notion sometimes floated by religious or quasi-religious acquaintances or bystanders, is, to her, another form of violence. She has not time for it. She is too busy asking, in this changed form, what makes a livable life, and how she can live it.

Freedom} is certainly not the right to own the economic, social, political, or cultural capital in order to dominate others and trade their happiness in a monopolistic market. Freedom is the process by which you develop a practice for being unavailable for servitude. -Avery F Gordon paraphrasing Toni Cade Bambara p.42

187. Is it a related form of aggrandizement, to inflate a heartbreak into a sort of allegory? Losing what one loves is simpler, more common, than that. More precise. One could leave it, too, as it is. -- Yet how can I explain, that every time I put a pin in the balloon of it, the balloon seems to swell back up as soon as I turn away from it?

Once something is no longer illicit, punishable, pathologized, or used as lawful basis for raw discrimination or acts of violence, that phenomenon will no longer be able to represent or deliver on subversion, the subcultural, the underground, the fringe, in the same way

Whereas an art that affects you in the moment, but which you then find hard to remember, is straining to bring you to another level. It offers images or ideas from that other level, that other way of being, which is why you find them hard to remember. But it has opened you to the possibility of growing into what you are not yet, which is exactly what art should do.