184 Quotes by Maggie Nelson

Last night I wept in a way I haven’t wept for some time. I wept until I aged myself. I watched it happen in the mirror. I watched the lines arrive around my eyes like engraved sunbursts; it was like watching flowers open in time-lapse on a windowsill. The tears not only aged my face, they also changed its texture, turned the skin of my cheeks into putty. I recognized this as a rite of decadence, but I did not know how to stop it.

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

Fifteen days after we are born, we begin to discriminate between colors. For the rest of our lives, barring blunted or blinded sight, we find ourselves face-to-face with all these phenomena at once, and we call the whole shimmering mess “color.” You might even say that it is the business of the eye to make colored forms out of what is essentially shimmering. This is how we “get around” in the world. Some might also call it the source of our suffering.

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

Drinking when you are depressed is like throwing kerosene on a fire”, I read in another self-help book at the bookstore. What depression felt like a fire? I think, shoving the book back on the shelf.

Perhaps it is becoming clearer why I felt no romance when you told me that you carried my last letter with you, everywhere you went, for months on end, unopened. This may have served some purpose for you, but whatever it was, surely it bore little resemblance to mine. I never aimed to give you a talisman, an empty vessel to flood with whatever longing, dread, or sorrow happened to be the day’s mood. I wrote it because I had something to say to you.

In other words, she wanted it both ways. There is much to be learned from wanting something both ways.

What if where I am is what I need?

At times I fake my enthusiasm. At others, I fear I am incapable of communicating the depth of it.