Maggie Nelson quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Maggie Nelson

Maggie Nelson Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Maggie Nelson on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

(Visibility makes possible, but it also disciplines: disciplines gender, disciplines genre.)

A man who thinks he is a king is mad, a king who thinks he is a king is no less so.

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

There is nothing you can throw at me that I cannot metabolize, no thing impervious to my alchemy.

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

What I know: when I met you, a blue rush began. I want you to know, I no longer hold you responsible.

Ginsberg, Clifton, Sedgwick - are

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

The freedom to be happy restricts human freedom if you are not free to be not happy.

Empirically speaking, we are made of star stuff. Why aren't we talking more about that?

Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color.

To take a breath of water: does the thought panic or excite you?

You've punctured my solitude, I told you.

I feel I can give you everything without giving myself away, I whispered in your basement bed. If one does one's solitude right, this is the prize.

I know we're still here, who knows for how long, ablaze with our care, its ongoing song.

Evolution strikes me as infinitely more spiritually profound than Genesis.

How people are often merciless
on those they love the most

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

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

The time for blithely asserting that sleeping with whomever you want however you want is going to jam its machinery is long past.

Perhaps I had inadvertently brushed up against the Buddhist axiom, that enlightenment is the ultimate disappointment.

In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.

The happiness police are going to come and arrest us if we go on this way. Arrest us for our luck.

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

What if where I am is what I need?

[He] told me more than once that being with me is like an epileptic with a pacemaker being married to a strobe light artist.

But really justice has no coordinates, no teleology.

I told you I wanted to live in a world in which the antidote to shame is not honor, but honesty.

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

In life and art, there are distinctions to be made between what an act of cruelty consists of.

To devote yourself to someone else's pussy can be a means of devoting yourself to your own.

And certainly there are many speakers whom I'd like to see do more trembling, more unknowing, more apologizing.

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

Misogyny, when expressed or explored by men, remains a timeless classic.

We don't get to choose what or whom we love, I want to say. We just don't get to choose.

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.

The moment of queer pride is a refusal to be shamed by witnessing the other as being ashamed of you.

You, reader, are alive today, reading this, because someone once adequately policed your mouth exploring.

229. I am writing all this down in blue ink, so as to remember that all words, not just some, are written in water.

I don't ever believe in violence as a kind of medicine.

As if keening on your knees
were somehow obscene
As if there were a control
so marvelous
you could teach it
to eat pain.

I have been trying, for some time now, to find dignity in my loneliness. I have been finding this hard to do. 72.

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

Why should I feel lonely? is not our planet in the Milky Way? (Thoreau).

95. But please don't write again to tell me how you have woken up weeping. I already know how you are in love with your weeping.

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

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

Mother and her entire family line are obsessed with skinniness as an indicator of physical, moral, and economic fitness.

I don't think there's any formula for what makes great art.

Skin is soft; it takes what you do to it.

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

So far as I can tell, most worthwhile pleasures on this earth slip between gratifying another and gratifying oneself. Some would call that an ethics.

Mostly I have felt myself becoming a servant of sadness. I am still looking for the beauty in that.

Loneliness is solitude with a problem.

And we have not yet heard enough, if anything, about the female gaze. About the scorch of it, with the eyes staying in the head.