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 your heart.

  Maggie Nelson

  Beautiful, Heart, Bird

  7 Copy quote

• 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, it says, and so am I.

  Maggie Nelson

  Loneliness, Blue, Solitude

  Maggie Nelson (2009). “Bluets”, p.28, Wave Books

  13 Copy quote

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

  Maggie Nelson

  Art, Thinking, Great Art

  9 Copy quote

• Not to be too doctrinaire, but we live in the patriarchy! And therefore anything explicitly associated with the female gender, including motherhood, needs to be defensively claimed, because it's either devalued or sentimentally idealized, but not supported. I so thoroughly believe that female human beings have worth that I don't feel the need to argue it, but I think that there's a part of me that very specifically wants to make space for those ideas to be centralized, if only for the moment.

  Maggie Nelson

  Believe, Motherhood, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• I love language. It doesn't bother me that its effects are partial. To me that is very sanity-producing. It would be weird if the effects of language were more than partial, if your whole life existed within your texts. That would be much scarier to me than language being an inadequate tool to represent.

  Maggie Nelson

  Language, Whole Life, Bother

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• I have been trying, for some time now, to find dignity in my loneliness. I have been finding this hard to do. It is easier, of course, to find dignity in one's solitude. Loneliness is solitude with a problem.

  Maggie Nelson

  Loneliness, Solitude, Trying

  Maggie Nelson (2009). “Bluets”, p.28, Wave Books

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Art, Attention, Enough

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Real, Book, Writing

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• It's a lot easier to write about people when you're not living with them!

  Maggie Nelson

  Writing, People

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  5 Copy quote

• I know that a lot of feminist fears about the trans movement have been, "Wait, we never got to the part where we focus on women! We tried for a minute, but we don't want to lose the category all of a sudden. We haven't heard yet from the females with children called mothers, we haven't heard yet from all these groups!" On the one hand I'm very sympathetic to that, but the category of Women or Mothers, any of these categories, are on shifting sands and always have been.

  Maggie Nelson

  Mother, Children, Feminist

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• We're all human beings with bodily needs living within a system. We don't need to prove that we're not a part of the fabric of the culture in order to want to change it.

  Maggie Nelson

  Culture, Prove

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• I feel excited in that I think boys born to feminists have a leg up. At least, the ones I've met seem like they do. There's something really vital about that exchange. I think I'd only imagined, beforehand, handing down a feminism to a young girl. But I'm newly excited by the challenge of raising a boy.

  Maggie Nelson

  Girl, Boys, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• For pragmatic reasons, for lessening of violence and for allowing people to live better lives, I think that the march forward for GLBTQ+ rights is a worthwhile one. But for me, hopefully the frontier is alliance-making across all the social issues, whereby people can get over whatever prejudices they're holding in order to keep their eyes on making livable lives for people in all states of vulnerability, no matter what their gender, sexuality, race, class, origin, whatever.

  Maggie Nelson

  Eye, Thinking, People

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• Is it exciting to have a codified identity, which then gets a codified set of rights and recognitions and visibility? Are we supposed to take it from there, within the same system? Or are we trying to upset the table before we want a place at it?

  Maggie Nelson

  Upset, Trying, Identity

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• Whenever you get involved with talking about rights, you're talking about being a citizen. You're talking about being a citizen in capitalism; you're talking about what rights are granted to what identities, under what laws, and all that is a big mix. Marriage is, among many other things, a formality to channel capital through a family. And that's why the big DOMA lawsuit was about paying too many taxes! "I wouldn't have had to pay all these taxes if Theodora had been Theo" - that was the big tagline. It's all about protecting assets.

  Maggie Nelson

  Identity, Granted, Taxes

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• labels can be fun! Some people are like, "As a card-carrying bear, where I also have a little bit of fairy in me..." People have fun collaging these; there's a fun people have with their identifications. The irony of them can be lost if you're just wholeheartedly anti-identitarian.

  Maggie Nelson

  Fun, People, Irony

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• I'm not sure how to put this, but I didn't want things like gender transition to be, like, the money shot in talking about bodily change. The truth is that we are all changing all the time to each other. Anybody who's been in a relationship for more than a year, more than five years, knows this.

  Maggie Nelson

  Truth Is, Gender, Not Sure

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

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

  Maggie Nelson

  Believe, Medicine, Violence

  4 Copy quote

• Our kids just aren't living in the same generation, and if they're not introduced to gender identity as a problem, they won't internalize them as a problem. Which isn't to say they won't meet bigotry in their lives.

  Maggie Nelson

  Kids, Identity, Problem

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• Most of the bio men on earth were born to women, so it's pretty ordinary! But I think because I had come from a matriarchy - my father died when I was young, and I only have a sister and a stepsister - when I told my mom and my sister that I was having a boy, they were both like, "That does not compute within our family relation!" It was like, "Girls only here!" Now that all seems very strange to me.

  Maggie Nelson

  Girl, Mom, Father

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

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

  Maggie Nelson

  Art, Made, Distinction

  4 Copy quote

• There's that layering of selves that we can have with someone else across a long relationship. I go to the baths, the Korean spa. I love looking at the maps of people's bodies. The women have so many mastectomy scars and ectopic pregnancy scars and stretch marks, and all these things are amazing and wondrous to me. I guess I find it stranger not to attend to flux than to attend to it. But in a relationship it's also scary - you don't know where you're going to end up when you go through change.

  Maggie Nelson

  Pregnancy, Long, Scary

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• Yes, I'm writing about motherhood, but I bristle a little bit, especially living with someone whose parenting falls between the cracks of what the culture is ready to recognize as mothering or fathering, but who most certainly is an excellent parent.

  Maggie Nelson

  Fall, Writing, Motherhood

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

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