Quotes by Maggie Nelson

About Maggie Nelson:

Maggie Nelson is an American poet, art critic, lyric essayist and nonfiction author of books such as Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions, The Red Parts: A Memoir, The Art of Cruelty, Something Bright, Then Holes, Jane: A Murder, The Latest Winter, Shiner, and Bluets.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Like many self-help books, The Deepest Blue is full of horrifyingly simplistic language and some admittedly good advice. Somehow the women in the book learn to say: That’s my depression talking. It’s not “me.” As if we could scrape the color ...

Maggie Nelson

One thing they don’t tell you ’bout the blues when you got ’em, you keep on fallin’ ’cause there ain't no bottom,' sings Emmylou Harris, and she may be right. Perhaps it would help to be told that there is no bottom, save, as they say, wher...

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 cons...

Maggie Nelson

238. 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. 239. But now you are talking as if love w...

Maggie Nelson

Mostly I have felt myself becoming a servant of sadness. I am still looking for the beauty in that.

Maggie Nelson

In life and art, there are distinctions to be made between what an act of cruelty consists of.

Maggie Nelson

I don't think there's any formula for what makes great art.

Maggie Nelson

Art to me is not precious enough that I feel territorial about what the word gets applied to. Conversations about what counts as art and what doesn't doesn't captivate my attention very much.

Maggie Nelson

In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.

Maggie Nelson

So far as I can tell, most worthwhile pleasures on this earth slip between gratifying another and gratifying oneself. Some would call that an ethics.

Maggie Nelson

Evolution strikes me as infinitely more spiritually profound than Genesis.

Maggie Nelson

Misogyny, when expressed or explored by men, remains a timeless classic.

Maggie Nelson

That’s what we both hate about fiction, or at least crappy fiction—it purports to provide occasions for thinking through complex issues, but really it has predetermined the positions, stuffed a narrative full of false choices, and hooked you on t...

Maggie Nelson

Am I sitting here now, months later, in Los Angeles, writing all this down, because I want my life to matter? Maybe so. But I don't want it to matter more than others. I want to remember, or to learn, how to live as if it matters, as if they all matt...

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 your heart.

Maggie Nelson

I don't ever believe in violence as a kind of medicine.

Maggie Nelson

Author Bio

  • NameMaggie Nelson
  • DescriptionAmerican writer
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • AwardsGuggenheim Fellowship