AtomicQuote

Maggie Nelson Quotes

For to wish to forget how much you loved someone-- and then, to actually forget-- can feel, at times, like the slaughter of a beautiful bird who chose, by nothing short of grace, to make a habitat of...

Maggie Nelson

For to wish to forget how much you loved someone-- and then, to actually forget-- can feel, at times, like the slaughter of a beautiful bird who chose, by nothing short of grace, to make a habitat of...

Tags: love

But whatever I am, I know that slipperiness isn't all of it. I know now that a studied evasiveness has its own limitations, its own ways of inhibiting certain forms of happiness and pleasure. The plea...

Maggie Nelson

But whatever I am, I know that slipperiness isn't all of it. I know now that a studied evasiveness has its own limitations, its own ways of inhibiting certain forms of happiness and pleasure. The plea...

Tags: evasiveness, happiness, inhibition, ordinary devotion, pleasure, revisitations

About Author
Maggie Nelson (born 1973) is an American writer. She has been described as a genre-busting writer defying classification, working in autobiography, art criticism, theory, feminism, queerness, sexual violence, the history of the avant-garde, aesthetic theory, philosophy, scholarship, and poetry. Nelson has been the recipient of a 2016 MacArthur Fellowship, a 2012 Creative Capital Literature Fellowship, a 2011 NEA Fellowship in Poetry, and a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship in Nonfiction. Other honors include the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism and a 2007 Andy Warhol Foundation/Creative Capital Arts Writers Grant.

Words change depending on who speaks them; there is no cure. The answer isn't just to introduce new words (boi, cis-gendered, andro-fag) and then set out to reify their meanings (though obviously ther...

Maggie Nelson

Words change depending on who speaks them; there is no cure. The answer isn't just to introduce new words (boi, cis-gendered, andro-fag) and then set out to reify their meanings (though obviously ther...

Tags: gender, identity, language, relationships

For blue has no mind. It is not wise, nor does it promise any wisdom. It is beautiful, and despite what the poets and philosophers and theologians have said, I think beauty neither obscures truth nor...

Maggie Nelson

For blue has no mind. It is not wise, nor does it promise any wisdom. It is beautiful, and despite what the poets and philosophers and theologians have said, I think beauty neither obscures truth nor...

Tags: beauty, truth

This is the dysfunction talking. This is the disease talking. This is how much I miss you talking. This is the deepest blue, talking, talking, always talking to you.

Maggie Nelson

This is the dysfunction talking. This is the disease talking. This is how much I miss you talking. This is the deepest blue, talking, talking, always talking to you.

Tags: heartbreak, love, mental health, solitude

But is there really such a thing as nothing, as nothingness? I don't now. I know we're still here, who knows for how long, ablaze with our care, its ongoing song.

Maggie Nelson

But is there really such a thing as nothing, as nothingness? I don't now. I know we're still here, who knows for how long, ablaze with our care, its ongoing song.

Tags: nothing, nothingness

Girls are cruelest to themselves, observes Anne Carson in The Glass Essay, her brilliant long poem about the ravages of female anger, loneliness, grief, and desire, giving us as poetic adage what any...

Maggie Nelson

Girls are cruelest to themselves, observes Anne Carson in The Glass Essay, her brilliant long poem about the ravages of female anger, loneliness, grief, and desire, giving us as poetic adage what any...

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 tho...

Maggie Nelson

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 tho...

Ik vind het grootmoedig van Butler dat ze de diffuse 'commodificatie van identiteit' aanmerkt als het probleem. Ik zou, minder grootmoedig, willen zeggen dat het simpele feit dat ze lesbisch is voor s...

Maggie Nelson

Ik vind het grootmoedig van Butler dat ze de diffuse 'commodificatie van identiteit' aanmerkt als het probleem. Ik zou, minder grootmoedig, willen zeggen dat het simpele feit dat ze lesbisch is voor s...

Perhaps because I have spent hours sermonizing to students about the sins of the passive voice—how it can obfuscate meaning, deaden vitality, and abandon the task of assigning agency or responsibility...

Maggie Nelson

Perhaps because I have spent hours sermonizing to students about the sins of the passive voice—how it can obfuscate meaning, deaden vitality, and abandon the task of assigning agency or responsibility...