Book Quote by Maggie Nelson

“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, you feel pressure to choose. I feel more comfortable living in the paradoxes that I've named and laid out, whereas when I started they might have felt like real agitations. At least I see them more clearly after having sketched them for myself and made a place to stand in relationship to them that felt okay enough to last through the course of a book.”

Maggie Nelson

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Book Burn out Enough Kind Okay Paradox Real Sometimes Thinking Writing

More by Maggie Nelson

“When I was alive, I aimed to be a student not of longing but of light.”

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“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…

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“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…

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“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.…

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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 cannot love me that way; it has no arms. But sometimes I do feel its presence to be a sort of wink-Here you are again,…

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“But “knowing the truth” does not come with redemption as a guarantee, nor does a feeling of redemption guarantee an end to a cycle of wrongdoing. Some would even say it is key to maintaining it, insofar as it can work as a reset button—a purge that cleans the slate, without any guarantee of change at the root. Placing all…

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“Girls are cruelest to themselves,” observes Anne Carson in “The Glass Essay,” her brilliant long poem about the ravages of female anger, loneliness, grief,…

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“On one hand, the Aristotelian, perhaps evolutionary need to put everything into categories– predators, twilight, edible – on the other, the need to pay homage…

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

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“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…

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“I edit myself into a boldness that is neither native or foreign to me. At times I grow tired of this approach, and all its gendered baggage. Over the years I’ve had to train myself to wipe the ‘sorry’ off almost every work e-mail I write; otherwise, each might begin, Sorry for the delay, Sorry for the confusion, Sorry for…

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“The idea is a complicated one, as the burden falls to us to differentiate this Divine Darkness from other kinds of darknesses-- that off a "dark night of the soul," the darkness of sin, and so on. "We pray that we may come unto this Darkness which is beyond light, and, without seeing and without knowing, to see and to…

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