Quotes from Maggie Nelson

To align oneself with the real while intimating that others are at play, approximate, or in imitation can feel good. But any fixed claim on realness, especially when it is tied to an identity, also has a finger in psychosis.

Eventually I confess to a friend some details about my weeping—its intensity, its frequency. She says that she thinks we sometimes weep in front of a mirror not to inflame self-pity, but because we want to feel witnessed in our despair. (Can a reflection be a witness?)

How clearly I have seen my condition, yet how childishly I have acted," says Goethe's sorrowful young Werther. "How clearly I still see it, and yet show no sign of improvement.

According to Dionysius, the Divine Darkness appears dark only because it is so dazzlingly bright-- a paradox I have attempted to understand by looking directly at the sun and noticing the dark spot that flowers at its center. But as compelling as this paradox, or this experiment, may be, I am not as interested in it as I am the fact that in Christian iconography, this "dazzling darkness" appears with startling regularity as blue.

If there's one thing homonormativity reveals, it's the troubling fact that you can be victimized and in no way be radical; it happens very often among homosexuals as with every other oppressed minority.

We sometimes weep in front of a mirror not to inflame self-pity, but because we want to feel witnessed in our despair.

It is absurd, Barthes says, to try to flee from language's assertive nature 'adding to each sentence some little phrase of uncertainty, as if anything that came out of language could make language tremble.' 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.

none seemed irreverent enough to address the situation of being a baby, of caretaking a baby. Do castration and the Phallus tell us the deep Truths of Western culture or just the truth of how things are and might not always be? It astonishes and shames me to think that I spent years finding such questions not only comprehensible, but compelling.

On one hand, the Aristotelian, perhaps evolutionary need to put everything into categories– predators, twilight, edible – on the other, the need to pay homage to the transitive, the flight, the great soup of being in which we actually live.

Is the something inherently queer about pregnancy itself, insofar as it profoundly alters one's normal state and occasions a radical intimacy with, and radical alienation from, one's body? How can an experience so profoundly strange and wild and transformative also symbolize or enact the ultimate confromity? Or is this just another disqualification of anyhting tied to closely to the female animal from the privileged term, in this case nonconformity or radicality?

During our first forays out as a couple, I blushed a lot, felt dizzy with my luck, unable to contain the nearly exploding fact that I've so obviously gotten everything I'd ever wanted, everything there was to get. Handsome, brilliant, quick-witted, articulate, forceful, you. We spent hours and hours on the red couch, giggling, The happiness police are going to come and arrest us if we go on this way. Arrest us for our luck.

But I trust I will live in my skin again, if life is sweet and long.

I knew you were a good animal, but felt myself to be standing before an enormous mountain, a lifetime of unwillingness to claim what I wanted, to ask for it. Now here you were, your face close to mine, waiting. The words I eventually found may have been Argo , but now I know: there's no substitute for saying them with one's own mouth.

We struggled to understand how a contract with the so-called secular state could mandate some kind of spiritual ritual.

When we take Iggy to the doctor together now, the nurse always says how happy it makes her to see a father helping out with a baby. 'I'm certainly doing their team a lot of favors', you mutter.

For it isn't just moments of happiness, which is all I thought we got. It's happiness that spreads.

But is there really such a thing as nothing, as nothingness? I don't now. I know we're still here, who knows for how long, ablaze with our care, its ongoing song.

The task of the cervix is to stay closed, to make an impenetrable wall protecting the fetus, for approximately forty weeks of a pregnancy. After that, by means of labor, the wall must somehow become an opening. This happens through dilation, which is not a shattering, but an extreme thinning.

Instantaneous, noncalibrated, digital self-revelation is one of my greatest nightmares.

Once we name something, you said, we can never see it the same way again. All that is unnameable falls away, gets lost, is murdered. You called this the cookie-cutter function of our minds. You said that you knew this not from shunning language but from immersion in it, on the screen, in conversation, onstage, on the page.

all touch starting to sicken, as if the cells of my skin were individually nauseated

97. And now, I think, we can say: a glass bead may flush the world with color, but it alone makes no necklace. I wanted the necklace.

She wanted to be at home, crowded in with her beloved Parisian-themed knickknacks—all her I LOVE PARIS plaques, miniature Eiffel Towers. All of her passwords and e-mail addresses were variants on Paris, a city she would never see.

Goethe describes blue as lively color, but one devoid of gladness. "It may be said to disturb rather than enliven.". Is to be in love with blue, then, to be in love with a disturbance? And what kind of madness is it anyway, to be in love with something constitutionallu incapable of loving you back?