184 Quotes by Maggie Nelson

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.

I have been trying to place myself in a land of great sunshine, and abandon my will therewith.

But whatever sameness I’ve noted in my relationships with women is not the sameness of Woman, and certainly not the sameness of parts. Rather, it is the shared, crushing understanding of what it means to live in a patriarchy.

Psychology forces everything we call love into the pathological or the delusional or the biologically explicable, that if that I was feeling wasn’t love then I am forced to admit that I don’t know what love is, or, more simply, that I loved a bad man.

Is to be in love with blue, then, to be in love with a disturbance? Or is the love itself the disturbance? And what kind of madness is it anyway, to be in love with something constitutionally incapable of loving you back?

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

That this blue exists makes my life a remarkable one, just to have seen it. To have seen such beautiful things. To find oneself placed in their midst. Choiceless.

And if ‘saturation’ means that one simply could not absorb or contain one single drop more, why does ‘saturation’ not bring with it a connotation of satisfaction, either in concept, or in experience?

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