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Top Maggie Nelson Quotes

Browse top 24 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Maggie Nelson.

Favorite Maggie Nelson Quotes

1. "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's not "me."As if we could scrape the color off the iris and still see." ~ Maggie Nelson
2. "Mostly I have felt myself becoming a servant of sadness. I am still looking for the beauty in that." ~ Maggie Nelson
3. "I don't ever believe in violence as a kind of medicine." ~ Maggie Nelson
4. "In life and art, there are distinctions to be made between what an act of cruelty consists of." ~ Maggie Nelson
5. "Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color." ~ Maggie Nelson
6. "I can remember a time when I took Henry James's advice--'try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!'--deeply to heart. I think I was then imagining that the net effect of becoming one of those people would be one of accretion. Whereas if you truly become someone on whom nothing is lost, then loss will not be lost upon you, either." ~ Maggie Nelson
7. "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." ~ Maggie Nelson
8. "Loneliness is solitude with a problem." ~ Maggie Nelson
9. "125. Of course, you could just take off the blindfold and say, 'I think this game is stupid and I'm not playing it anymore.' And it must also be admitted that hitting the wall or wandering off in the wrong direction or tearing off the blindfold is as much a part of the game as is pinning the tail on the donkey." ~ Maggie Nelson
10. "53. 'We mainly suppose the experiential quality to be an intrinsic quality of the physical object'-this is the so-called systematic illusion of color. Perhaps it is also that of love. But I am not willing to go there-not just yet. I believed in you." ~ Maggie Nelson
11. "156. Why is the sky blue? -A fair enough question, and one I have learned the answer to several times. Yet every time I try to explain it to someone or remember it to myself, it eludes me. Now I like to remember the question alone, as it reminds me that my mind is essentially a sieve, that I am mortal.157. The part I do remember: that the blue of the sky depends on the darkness of empty space behind it. As one optics journal puts it, "The color of any planetary atmosphere viewed against the black of space and illuminated by a sunlike star will also be blue." In which case blue is something of an ecstatic accident produced by void and fire." ~ Maggie Nelson
12. "51. You might as well act as if objects had the colors, The Encyclopedia says. –Well, it is as you please. But what would it look like to act otherwise?" ~ Maggie Nelson
13. "20. Fucking leaves everything as it is. Fucking may in no way interfere with the actual use of language. For it cannot give it any foundation either. It leaves everything as it is." ~ Maggie Nelson
14. "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." ~ Maggie Nelson
15. "95. But please don't write again to tell me how you have woken up weeping. I already know how you are in love with your weeping." ~ Maggie Nelson
16. "WHAT IT ISIt is what it is. Butwhat is it?What it is—Some soft tautologywhose terms are touchTime to give, timeto give it up." ~ Maggie Nelson
17. "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 because we want to feel witnessed in our despair. (Can a reflection be a witness? Can one pass oneself the sponge wet with vinegar from a reed?)" ~ Maggie Nelson
18. "If he hadn't lied to you, he would have been a different person than he is.' She is trying to get me to see that although I thought I loved this man very completely for exactly who he was, I was in fact blind to the man he actually was, or is." ~ Maggie Nelson
19. "And we have not yet heard enough, if anything, about the female gaze. About the scorch of it, with the eyes staying in the head." ~ Maggie Nelson
20. "96. For a prince of blue is a prince of blue because keeps 'a pet sorrow, a blue-devil familiar, that goes with him everywhere' (Lowell, 1870) This is how a prince of blue becomes a pain devil." ~ Maggie Nelson
21. "32. When I say "hope," I don't mean hope for anything in particular. I guess I just mean thinking that it's worth it to keep one's eyes open. "What are all those / fuzzy-looking things out there? / Trees? Well, I'm tired / of them": the last words of William Carlos Williams's English grandmother." ~ Maggie Nelson
22. "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 there is no bottom, save, as they say, wherever and whenever you stop digging. You have to stand there, spade in hand, cold whiskey sweat beaded on your brow, eyes misshapen and wild, some sorry-ass grave digger grown bone-tired of the trade. You have to stand there in the dirty rut you dug, alone in the darkness, in all its pulsing quiet, surrounded by the scandal of corpses." ~ Maggie Nelson
23. "7. But what kind of love is it, really? Don't fool yourself and call it sublimity. Admit that you have stood in front of a little pile of powdered ultramarine pigment in a glass cup at a museum and felt a stinging desire. But to do what? Liberate it? Purchase it? Ingest it? . . . You might want to reach out and disturb the pile of pigment, for example, first staining your fingers with it, then staining the world. You might want to dilute it and swim in it, you might want to rouge your nipples with it, you might want to paint a virgin's robe with it. But still you wouldn't be accessing the blue of it. Not exactly." ~ Maggie Nelson
24. "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 learn, how to live as if it matters, as if they all matter, even if they don't." ~ Maggie Nelson

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Today's Quote

My works really begin in a very simple way. Sometimes it's an image, and sometimes it's words I might write, like a fragment of a poem."
Author: Bill Viola

What Did Maggie Nelson Talk About?

Here
Thin
Wit
Use
Self
Ear
Act
King
Color
Hen
Yes
She
Ally
Cause
Eyes
Admit
Again
Sit
Blind
Remember
Per
Pen
Member
May
Los
Lit
Lie
Con
Eye
Keep
Learn

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