“How clearly I have seen my condition, yet how childishly I have acted," says Goethe's sorrowful young Werther. "How clearly I still see it, and yet show no sign of improvement.” — 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
