17+ Maggie Nelson Quotes (Insightful, Raw And Refreshing)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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