184 Quotes by Maggie Nelson

Girls are cruelest to themselves,” observes Anne Carson in “The Glass Essay,” her brilliant long poem about the ravages of female anger, loneliness, grief, and desire, giving us as poetic adage what any number of other fields give us as statistic.

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.

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.

When all the mythologies have been set aside, we can see that, children or no children, 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.

You know so much about people from the second they open their mouths. Right away you might know that you might want to keep them out. That’s part of the horror of speaking, of writing. There is nowhere to hide. When you try to hide, the spectacle can grow grotesque.

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

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.

But if I were honest, or if I were at least to bump into the limits of my honesty, I would have to admit that I knew exactly how this love would end from the moment it began. The loss was probably before it was possible.

I think you overestimate the maturity of adults, he wrote me in his final letter, a letter he sent only after I’d broken down and written him first, after a year of silence.