Top 120 Maggie Nelson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The freedom to be happy restricts human freedom if you are not free to be not happy.”

— Maggie Nelson

2. “When I say “hope,” I don’t mean hope for anything in particular. I guess I just mean thinking that it’s worth it to keep one’s eyes open.”

— Maggie Nelson

3. “But whatever sameness I’ve noted in my relationships with women is not the sameness of Woman, and certainly not the sameness of parts. Rather, it is the shared, crushing understanding of what it means to live in a patriarchy.”

— Maggie Nelson

4. “I suppose it is possible that one day we will meet again and it will feel as if nothing ever happened between us.”

— Maggie Nelson

5. “I have heard that this pain can be converted, as it were, by accepting “the fundamental impermanence of all things.” This acceptance bewilders me: sometimes it seems an act of will; at others, of surrender.”

— Maggie Nelson

6. “I have been trying, for some time now, to find dignity in my loneliness. I have been finding this hard to do.”

— Maggie Nelson

7. “Words change depending on who speaks them; there is no cure.”

— Maggie Nelson

8. “The point wasn’t that if the outer world were schooled appropriately re: the characters’ preferred pronouns, everything would be right as rain. Because if the outsiders called the characters “he”, it would be a different kind of he. Words change depending on who speaks them; there is no cure.”

— Maggie Nelson

9. “Do not, however, make the mistake of thinking that all desire is yearning. “We love to contemplate blue, not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it,” wrote Goethe, and perhaps he is right. But I am not interested in longing to live in a world in which I already live. I don’t want to yearn for blue things, and God forbid for any “blueness.” Above all, I want to stop missing you.”

— Maggie Nelson

10. “Girls are cruelest to themselves,” observes Anne Carson in “The Glass Essay,” her brilliant long poem about the ravages of female anger, loneliness, grief, and desire, giving us as poetic adage what any number of other fields give us as statistic.”

— Maggie Nelson

11. “The half-circle of blinding turquoise ocean is this love’s primal scene. That this blue exists makes my life a remarkable one, just to have seen it.”

— Maggie Nelson

12. “We have not yet heard enough, if anything, about the female gaze. About the scorch of it.”

— Maggie Nelson

13. “There is nothing you can throw at me that I cannot metabolize, no thing impervious to my alchemy.”

— Maggie Nelson

14. “How clearly I have seen my condition, yet how childishly I have acted,” says Goethe’s sorrowful young Werther. “How clearly I still see it, and yet show no sign of improvement.”

— Maggie Nelson

15. “The mother of an adult child sees her work completed and undone at the same time.′ If this holds true, I may have to withstand not only rage, but also my undoing. Can one prepare for one’s undoing? How has my mother withstood mine? Why do I continue to undo her, when what I want to express above all else is that I lover her very much?”

— Maggie Nelson

16. “This is how much I miss you talking. This is the deepest blue, talking, talking, always talking to you.”

— Maggie Nelson

17. “What I know: when I met you, a blue rush began. I want you to know, I no longer hold you responsible.”

— Maggie Nelson

18. “That this blue exists makes my life a remarkable one, just to have seen it. To have seen such beautiful things. To find oneself placed in their midst. Choiceless.”

— Maggie Nelson

19. “Though lovers be lost love shall not”, etc. But I am not yet sure how to sever the love from the lover without occasioning some degree of carnage.”

— Maggie Nelson

20. “Is to be in love with blue, then, to be in love with a disturbance? Or is the love itself the disturbance? And what kind of madness is it anyway, to be in love with something constitutionally incapable of loving you back?”

— Maggie Nelson

21. “If I were today on my deathbed, I would name my love of the color blue and making love with you as two of the sweetest sensations I knew on this earth.”

— Maggie Nelson

22. “I told you I wanted to live in a world in which the antidote to shame is not honor, but honesty.”

— Maggie Nelson

23. “To align oneself with the real while intimating that others are at play, approximate, or in imitation can feel good. But any fixed claim on realness, especially when it is tied to an identity, also has a finger in psychosis.”

— Maggie Nelson

24. “I think you overestimate the maturity of adults, he wrote me in his final letter, a letter he sent only after I’d broken down and written him first, after a year of silence.”

— Maggie Nelson

25. “It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we have made that we exist,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson.”

— Maggie Nelson

26. “Even identical genital acts mean very different things to different people. This is a crucial point to remember, and also a difficult one. It reminds us that there is difference right where we may be looking for, and expecting, communion.”

— Maggie Nelson

27. “At times I fake my enthusiasm. At others, I fear I am incapable of communicating the depth of it.”

— Maggie Nelson

28. “We don’t get to choose what or whom we love, I want to say. We just don’t get to choose.”

— Maggie Nelson

29. “At a job interview at a university, three men sitting across from me at a table. On my cv it says that I am currently working on a book about the color blue. I have been saying this for years without writing a word. It is, perhaps, my way of making my life feel “in progress” rather than a sleeve of ash falling off a lit cigarette.”

— Maggie Nelson

30. “I feel I can give you everything without giving myself away, I whispered in your basement bed. If one does one’s solitude right, this is the prize.”

— Maggie Nelson

31. “Perhaps it’s the word radical that needs rethinking. But what could we angle ourselves toward instead, or in addition? Openness? Is that good enough, strong enough? You’re the only one who knows when you’re using things to protect yourself and keep your ego together and when you’re opening and letting things fall apart, letting the world come as it is – working with it rather than struggling against it. You’re the only one who knows. And the thing is, even you don’t always know.”

— Maggie Nelson

32. “229. I am writing all this down in blue ink, so as to remember that all words, not just some, are written in water.”

— Maggie Nelson

33. “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

34. “I labor grimly on these sentences, wondering all the while if prose is but the gravestone marking the forsaking of wildness.”

— Maggie Nelson

35. “You’ve punctured my solitude, I told you.”

— Maggie Nelson

36. “When all the mythologies have been set aside, we can see that, children or no children, the joke of evolution is that it is a teleology without a point, that we, like all animals, are a project that issues in nothing.”

— Maggie Nelson

37. “Never in my life have I felt more prochoice than when I was pregnant. And never in my life have I understood more thoroughly, and been more excited about, a life that began at conception.”

— Maggie Nelson

38. “Empirically speaking, we are made of star stuff. Why aren’t we talking more about that?”

— Maggie Nelson

39. “There are people out there who get annoyed at the story that Djuna barnes, rather than identify as a lesbian, preferred to say that she ‘just loved Thelma.’ Gertrude Stein reputedly made similar claims, albeit not in those exact terms, about Alice. I get why it’s politically maddening, but I’ve also always thought it a little romantic – the romance of letting an individual experience of desire take precedence over a categorical one.”

— Maggie Nelson

40. “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 off the iris and still see.”

— Maggie Nelson

41. “Perhaps I had inadvertently brushed up against the Buddhist axiom, that enlightenment is the ultimate disappointment.”

— Maggie Nelson

42. “I know we’re still here, who knows for how long, ablaze with our care, its ongoing song.”

— Maggie Nelson

43. “You know so much about people from the second they open their mouths. Right away you might know that you might want to keep them out. That’s part of the horror of speaking, of writing. There is nowhere to hide. When you try to hide, the spectacle can grow grotesque.”

— Maggie Nelson

44. “I have been trying to place myself in a land of great sunshine, and abandon my will therewith.”

— Maggie Nelson

45. “But the tacit undercurrent of her argument, as I felt it, was that Gallop’s maternity had rotted her mind – besotted it with the narcissism that makes one think that an utterly ordinary experience shared by countless others is somehow unique, or uniquely interesting.”

— Maggie Nelson

46. “You, reader, are alive today, reading this, because someone once adequately policed your mouth exploring.”

— Maggie Nelson

47. “The pleasure of recognizing that one may have to undergo the same realizations, write the same notes in the margin, return to the same themes in one’s work, relearn the same emotional truths, write the same book over and over again–not because one is stupid or obstinate or incapable of change, but because such revisitations constitute a life.”

— Maggie Nelson

48. “Drinking when you are depressed is like throwing kerosene on a fire”, I read in another self-help book at the bookstore. What depression felt like a fire? I think, shoving the book back on the shelf.”

— Maggie Nelson

49. “Exasperated, you finally said, ‘You think I’m not worried too? Of course I’m worried. What I don’t need is your worry on top of mine. I need your support.”

— Maggie Nelson

50. “The question up for debate between Socrates and Phaedrus is whether the written word kills memory or aids it – whether it cripples the mind’s power, or whether it cures it of its forgetfulness.”

— Maggie Nelson