Quotes by Maggie Nelson

“One thing they don’t tell you ’bout the blues when you got ’em, you keep on fallin’ ’cause there ain't no bottom,' sings Emmylou Harris, and she may be right. Perhaps it would help to be told that ...”

“Like many self-help books, The Deepest Blue is full of horrifyingly simplistic language and some admittedly good advice. Somehow the women in the book learn to say: That’s my depression talking. It...”

“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 ...”

“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...”

“Eventually I confess to a friend some details about my weeping—its intensity, its frequency. She says (kindly) that she thinks we sometimes weep in front of a mirror not to inflame self-pity, but b...”

“92. Eventually I confess to a friend some details about my weeping—its intensity, its frequency. She says (kindly) that she thinks we sometimes weep in front of a mirror not to inflame self-pity, b...”

“The question up for debate between Socrates and Phaedrus is whether the written word kills memory or aids it--whether it cripples the mind's power, or whether it cures it of its forgetfulness.”

“For the fact is that neuroscientists who study memory remain unclear on the question of whether each time we remember something we are accessing a stable “memory fragment”—often called a “trace” or...”

“It is easier, of course, to find dignity in one's solitude. Loneliness is solitude with a problem. Can blue solve the problem, or can it at least keep me company within it?—No, not exactly. It cann...”

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

“Do not, however, make the mistake of thinking that all desire is yearning.”

“But this time, so far as I can tell, my mother has not made her husband her desire incarnate, though she does love him very much. And for his part, so far as I can tell, he doesn’t try to talk her ...”

“Evolution strikes me as infinitely more spiritually profound than Genesis.”

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

“Trans” may work well enough as shorthand, but the quickly developing mainstream narrative it evokes (“born in the wrong body,” necessitating an orthopedic pilgrimage between two fixed destinations)...”

“I truly don’t understand why at every Q and A, someone always asks, “Do you have a routine?” or “Do you write every morning?” Why those questions remain interesting, I really have no idea. But sinc...”

“I like writing that puts the needle right into the vein. I don’t think, when I’m writing, “Tell a good story” or “find a meaning.” I’m thinking phrase by phrase, make it tight, make it good. Get th...”

“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.”

“Am I sitting here now, months later, in Los Angeles, writing all this down, because I want my life to matter? Maybe so. But I don't want it to matter more than others. I want to remember, or to lea...”

“[H]ow the force of one's adolescent curiosity and incipient lust often must war with the need to protect oneself from disgusting and wicked violators, how pleasure can coexist with awful degradatio...”