Eventually I confess to a friend some details about my weeping—its intensity, its frequency. She says (kindly) that she thinks we sometimes weep in front of a mirror not to inflame self-pity, but because we want to feel witnessed in our despair.

— Maggie Nelson

Evolution strikes me as infinitely more spiritually profound than Genesis.

— 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 reveals it. Likewise, it leads neither towards justice nor away from it. It is formation. It radiates.

— Maggie Nelson

For the fact is that neuroscientists who study memory remain unclear on whether each time we remember something we are accessing a stable “memory fragment”—often called a “trace” or an “engram”—or whether each time we remember something we are literally creating a new “trace” to house the thought. And since no one has yet been able to discern the material of these traces, nor to locate them in the brain, how one thinks of them remains mostly a matter of metaphor: they could be “scribbles,” “holograms,” or “imprints”; they could live in “spirals,” “rooms,” or “storage units.” Personally, when I imagine my mind in the act of remembering, I see Mickey Mouse in Fantasia, roving about in a milky, navy-blue galaxy shot through with twinkling cartoon stars.

— 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

[H]ow the force of one's adolescent curiosity and incipient lust often must bar with the need to protect oneself from disgusting and wicked violators, how pleasure can coexist with awful degradation without meaning the degradation was justified or a species of wish fulfillment; how it feels to be both accomplice and victim; and how such ambivalence scan live on in an adult sexual life.

— Maggie Nelson

I am trying to talk about what blue means, or what it means to me, apart from meaning.

— Maggie Nelson

I don't ever want to make the mistake of needing him as much as or more than he needs me. But there's no denying that sometimes, when we sleep together in the dark cavern of the bottom bunk, his big brother thrashing around on top, the white noise machine grinding out its fake rain, the green digital clock announcing every hour, Iggy's small body holds mine.

— Maggie Nelson

I felt the wild need for any or all of these people that night. Lying there alone, I began to feel - perhaps even to know - that I did not exist apart from their love and need of me. Of this latter I felt less sure, but it seemed possible, if the equation worked both ways. Falling asleep I thought, 'Maybe this, for me, is the hand of God.

— Maggie Nelson

I like writing that puts the needle right into the vein. I don’t think, when I’m writing, “Tell a good story” or “find a meaning.” I’m thinking phrase by phrase, make it tight, make it good. Get the idea out in language I can bear. I think there’s something musical about being impatient with boring sentences—it’s not that I don’t have boring sentences, God knows I do, but I’m impatient with them.

— Maggie Nelson