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Maggie Nelson

Maggie Nelson Quotes

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Famous Maggie Nelson Quotes

“In the wake of the Patriot Act, during the second administration of George W., you made a series of small, handheld weapons. The rule was that each weapon had to be assembled from household items within minutes. You’d been gay-bashed before, two black eyes while waiting in line for a burrito (you ran after him, of course). Now you thought, if the government comes for its citizens, we should be prepared, even if our weapons are pathetic. Your art-weapons included a steak knife affixed to a bottle of ranch dressing and mounted on an axe handle, a dirty sock sprouting nails, a wooden stump with a clump of urethane resin stuck to one end with dull bolts protruding from it, and more.”

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Book:The Argonauts
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“A day or two after my love pronouncement, now feral with vulnerability, I sent you the passage from Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes in which Barthes describes how the subject who utters the phrase “I love you” is like “the Argonaut renewing his ship during its voyage without changing its name.” Just as the Argo’s parts may be replaced over time but the boat is still called the Argo, whenever the lover utters the phrase “I love you,” its meaning must be renewed by each use, as “the very task of love and of language is to give to one and the same phrase inflections which will be forever new.”

Roland Barthes
Book:The Argonauts
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“It's like she's pulling Post-it notes out of her hair and lecturing from them, one of my peers once complained about the teaching style of my beloved teacher Mary Ann Caws. ...Ditto Eileen Myles, who tells a great story about a student at UC San Diego once complaining that her lecturing style was like 'throwing a pizza at us.' My feeling is, you should be so lucky to get a pizza in the face from Eileen Myles, or a Post-it note plucked from the nest of Mary Ann Caws's hair.”

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Book:The Argonauts
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“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, wherever and whenever you stop digging. You have to stand there, spade in hand, cold whiskey sweat beaded on your brow, eyes misshapen and wild, some sorry-ass grave digger grown bone-tired of the trade. You have to stand there in the dirty rut you dug, alone in the darkness, in all its pulsing quiet, surrounded by the scandal of corpses.”

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Book:Bluets
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“I remember that day very clearly: I had received a phone call. A friend had been in an accident. Perhaps she would not live. She had very little face, and her spine was broken in two places. She had not yet moved; the doctor described her as “a pebble in water.” I walked around Brooklyn and noticed that the faded peri-winkle of the abandoned Mobil gas station on the corner was suddenly blooming. In the baby-shit yellow showers at my gym, where snow sometimes fluttered in through the cracked gated windows, I noticed that the yellow paint was peeling in spots, and a decent, industrial blue was trying to creep in. At the bottom of the swimming pool, I watched the white winter light spangle the cloudy blue and I knew together they made God. When I walked into my friend’s hospital room, her eyes were a piercing, pale blue and the only part of her body that could move. I was scared. So was she. The blue was beating.”

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Book:Bluets
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“Many women describe the feeling of having a baby come out of their vagina as taking the biggest shit of their lives. This isn’t really a metaphor. The anal cavity and vaginal canal lean on each other; they, too, are the sex which is not one. Constipation is one of pregnancy’s principal features: the growing baby literally deforms and squeezes the lower intestines, changing the shape, flow, and plausibility of one’s feces. In late pregnancy, I was amazed to find that my shit, when it would finally emerge, had been deformed into Christmas tree ornament — type balls. Then, all through my labor, I could not shit at all, as it was keenly clear to me that letting go of the shit would mean the total disintegration of my perineum, anus, and vagina, all at once. I also knew that if, or when, I could let go of the shit, the baby would probably come out. But to do so would mean falling forever, going to pieces.”

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Book:The Argonauts
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“I awoke from this nightmare into a freezing cold motel room: the heater had broken at some point during the night, and the fan was now blowing icy air into the room. At first I tried to keep warm under the crappy motel bedspread by thinking about the man I loved. At the time he was traveling in Europe, and was thus unreachable. I didn't know it yet, but as I lay there, he was traveling with another woman. Does it matter now? I tried hard to feel his body wrapped tightly around mine. Next I tried to imagine everyone I had ever loved, and everyone who had ever loved me, wrapped around me. I tried to feel that I was the composite of all these people, instead of alone in a shitty motel room with a broken heater somewhere outside of Detroit, a few miles from where Jane's body was dumped thirty-six years ago on a March night just like this one. 'Need each other as much as you can bear,' writes Eileen Myles. 'Everywhere you go in the world.' 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.”

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Book:The Red Parts
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“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 were a consolation. Simone Weil warned otherwise. “Love is not consolation,” she wrote. “It is light.” 240. All right then, let me try to rephrase. When I was alive, I aimed to be a student not of longing but of light.”

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Book:Bluets
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“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.”

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Author:Maggie Nelson
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“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.”

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Author:Maggie Nelson
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“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.”

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Author:Maggie Nelson
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“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.”

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Author:Maggie Nelson
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“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.”

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Author: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 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.”

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Author:Maggie Nelson
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“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.”

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Author:Maggie Nelson
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