“To align oneself with the real while intimating that others are at play, approximate, or in imitation can feel good. But any fixed claim on realness, especially when it is tied to an identity, also has a finger in psychosis.… — Maggie Nelson Copy Share Image
“When I was alive, I aimed to be a student not of longing but of light.” — Maggie Nelson Copy Share Image
I think writing kind of burns out the flaming question. Sometimes it might feel like when you're living with certain paradoxes and they're unarticulated,… — Maggie Nelson Copy Share Image
“I want you to know, if you ever read this, there was a time when I would rather have had you by my side… — Maggie Nelson Copy Share Image
“It is absurd, Barthes says, to try to flee from language's assertive nature 'adding to each sentence some little phrase of uncertainty, as if… — Maggie Nelson Copy Share Image
“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.… — Maggie Nelson Copy Share Image
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… — Maggie Nelson Copy Share Image
“But “knowing the truth” does not come with redemption as a guarantee, nor does a feeling of redemption guarantee an end to a cycle… — Maggie Nelson Copy Share Image
“Girls are cruelest to themselves,” observes Anne Carson in “The Glass Essay,” her brilliant long poem about the ravages of female anger, loneliness, grief,… — Maggie Nelson Copy Share Image
“On one hand, the Aristotelian, perhaps evolutionary need to put everything into categories– predators, twilight, edible – on the other, the need to pay homage… — Maggie Nelson Copy Share Image
“Do not, however, make the mistake of thinking that all desire is yearning.” — Maggie Nelson Copy Share Image
“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… — Maggie Nelson Copy Share Image
“I edit myself into a boldness that is neither native or foreign to me. At times I grow tired of this approach, and all… — Maggie Nelson Copy Share Image
