Blue Quote by Maggie Nelson

““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 otherwise. 'Love is not consolation,' she wrote. 'It is light.' 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

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More by Maggie Nelson

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

Maggie Nelson

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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…

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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,…

Maggie Nelson

“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.”

Maggie Nelson

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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…

Maggie Nelson

Explore all 111 Maggie Nelson quotes

More Blue quotes

When I haven't any blue I use red.

Pablo Picasso

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It is sometimes said that scientists are unromantic, that their passion to figure out robs the world of beauty and mystery. But is it not stirring to understand how the world actually works — that white light is made of colors, that color is the way we perceive the wavelengths of light, that transparent air reflects light, that in so…

Carl Sagan

If you're white and you're wrong, then you're wrong; if you're black and you're wrong, you're wrong. People are people. Black, blue, pink, green - God make no rules about color; only society make rules where my people suffer, and that why we must have redemption and redemption now.

Bob Marley

Memory revises me. Even now a letter comes from a place I don’t know, from someone with my name and postmarked years ago, while I await injunctions from the light or the dark; I wait for shapeliness limned, or dissolution. Is paradise due or narrowly missed until another thousand years? I wait in a blue hour and faraway noise of…

Li-Young Lee

Human beings should stick together. Honestly, if I see a red-haired person with blue eyes now, I say, 'Is your granny black?'

Grace Jones

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The Louvre! The Louvre has me in its clutches. Every time I'm there rich blessings rain down upon me. I am coming to understand Titian more and more and learning to love him. And then there is Botticelli's sweet Madonna, with red roses behind her, standing against a blue-green sky. And Fiesole with his poignant little biblical stories, so simply…

Paula Modersohn-Becker

We live in a state with a wonderful climate and plenty of natural beauty, from the shores of Cumberland Island to the Chattahoochee River…

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I had never done anything with blue screen before, or prosthetics, or anything like that. Lord of the Rings was like stepping into a videogame for me. It was another world completely. But, to be honest, I basically did it so that I could have the ears. I thought they would really work with my bare head.Working with Martin Scorsese…

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UN peacekeeping operations are now increasingly complex and multi-dimensional, going beyond monitoring a ceasefire to actually bringing failed States back to life, often after decades of conflict. The blue helmets and their civilian colleagues work together to organize elections, enact police and judicial reform, promote and protect human rights, conduct mine-clearance, advance gender equality, achieve the voluntary disarmament of former…

Kofi Annan