184 Quotes by Maggie Nelson

  • Author Maggie Nelson
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    238. I want you to know, if you ever read this, there was a time when I would rather have had you by my side than any one of these words; I would rather have had you by my side than all the blue in the world.239. 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. All right then, let me try to rephrase. When I was alive, I aimed to be a student not of longing but of light.

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  • Author Maggie Nelson
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    The half-circle of blinding turquoise ocean is this love’s primal scene. 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. I returned there yesterday and stood again upon the mountain.

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  • Author Maggie Nelson
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    The mother of an adult child sees her work completed and undone at the same time.' If this holds true, I may have to withstand not only rage, but also my undoing. Can one prepare for one's undoing? How has my mother withstood mine? Why do I continue to undo her, when what I want to express above all else is that I lover her very much?

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  • Author Maggie Nelson
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    [A]fter all, what does it mean for pain to be 'memorable'? You're either in pain or you're not. And it isn't the pain that one forgets. It's the touching death part. As the baby might say to its mother, we might say to death: I forget you, but you remember me.

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  • Author Maggie Nelson
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    I think beauty neither obscures truth nor reveals it. Likewise, it leads neither toward justice nor away from it.

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  • Author Maggie Nelson
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    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.

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  • Author Maggie Nelson
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    I’m not on my way anywhere, Harry sometimes tells inquirers. How to explain, in a culture frantic for resolution, that sometimes the shit stays messy?

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  • Author Maggie Nelson
  • Quote

    I want you to know, if you ever read this, there was a time when I would rather have had you by my side than any one of these words; I would rather have had you by my side than all the blue in the world.But now you are talking as if love were a consolation. Simone Weil warned otherwise. 'Love is not consolation,' she wrote. 'It is light.'All right then, let me try to rephrase. When I was alive, I aimed to be a student not of longing but of light.

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