Top 120 Maggie Nelson Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “To take a breath of water: does the thought panic or excite you?”

— Maggie Nelson

52. “How does one get across the fact that the best way to find out how people feel about their gender or their sexuality – or anything else, really – is to listen to what they tell you, and to try to treat them accordingly, without shellacking over their version of reality with yours?”

— Maggie Nelson

53. “What if where I am is what I need?”

— Maggie Nelson

54. “Do not, however, make the mistake of thinking that all desire is yearning.”

— Maggie Nelson

55. “But if I were honest, or if I were at least to bump into the limits of my honesty, I would have to admit that I knew exactly how this love would end from the moment it began. The loss was probably before it was possible.”

— Maggie Nelson

56. “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

57. “Psychology forces everything we call love into the pathological or the delusional or the biologically explicable, that if that I was feeling wasn’t love then I am forced to admit that I don’t know what love is, or, more simply, that I loved a bad man.”

— Maggie Nelson

58. “So far as I can tell, most worthwhile pleasures on this earth slip between gratifying another and gratifying oneself. Some would call that an ethics.”

— Maggie Nelson

59. “We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate on them well,” wrote Emerson. Is it true? If so, who can bear to believe it?”

— Maggie Nelson

60. “Evolution strikes me as infinitely more spiritually profound than Genesis.”

— Maggie Nelson

61. “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.”

— Maggie Nelson

62. “199. 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

63. “This slice of truth, offered in the final hour, ended up beginning a new chapter of my adulthood, the one in which I realized that age doesn’t necessarily bring anything with it, save itself. The rest is optional.”

— Maggie Nelson

64. “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

65. “I don’t even want to talk about “female sexuality” until there is a control group. And there never will be.”

— Maggie Nelson

66. “You pass as a guy; I, as pregnant. Our waiter cheerfully tells us about his family, expresses delight in ours. On the surface, it may have seemed as though your body was becoming more and more “male,” mine, more and more “female.” But that’s not how it felt on the inside. On the inside, we were two human animals undergoing transformations beside each other, bearing each other loose witness. In other words, we were aging.”

— Maggie Nelson

67. “Oh, how often have I cursed those foolish pages of mine which made my youthful sufferings public property!” Goethe wrote years after the publication of The Sorrows of Young Werther.”

— Maggie Nelson

68. “100. It often happens that we count our days, as if the act of measurement made us some kind of promise. But really this is like hoisting a harness onto an invisible horse. “There is simply no way that a year from now you’re going to feel the way you feel today,” a different therapist said to me last year at this time. But though I have learned to act as if I feel differently, the truth is that my feelings haven’t really changed.”

— Maggie Nelson

69. “It is easier, of course, to find dignity in one’s solitude. Loneliness is solitude with a problem.”

— Maggie Nelson

70. “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

71. “Barthes found the exit to this merry-go-round by reminding himself that “it is language which is assertive, not he.”

— Maggie Nelson

72. “Loneliness is solitude with a problem.”

— Maggie Nelson

73. “The problem is, of course, that art typically requires an audience, which loops us right back to the problem of observing actions and losing ourselves in consideration of their imagined form.”

— Maggie Nelson

74. “This is generous, for to be close to her pain has always felt like a privilege to me, even though pain could be defined as that which we typically aim to avoid.”

— Maggie Nelson

75. “Silverman also contends that a baby’s demands on the mother can be “very flattering to the mother’s narcissism, since it attributes to her the capacity to satisfy her infant’s lack, and so – by extension – her own. Since most women in our culture are egoically wounded, the temptation to bathe in the sun of this idealization often proves irresistible.”

— Maggie Nelson

76. “My writing is riddled with such tics of uncertainty. I have no excuse or solution, save to allow myself the tremblings, then go back in later and slash them out. In this way I edit myself into a boldness that is neither native nor foreign to me.”

— Maggie Nelson

77. “Perhaps it is becoming clearer why I felt no romance when you told me that you carried my last letter with you, everywhere you went, for months on end, unopened. This may have served some purpose for you, but whatever it was, surely it bore little resemblance to mine. I never aimed to give you a talisman, an empty vessel to flood with whatever longing, dread, or sorrow happened to be the day’s mood. I wrote it because I had something to say to you.”

— Maggie Nelson

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

— Maggie Nelson

79. “In other words, she wanted it both ways. There is much to be learned from wanting something both ways.”

— Maggie Nelson

80. “But why bother with diagnoses at all, if a diagnosis is but a restatement of the problem?”

— Maggie Nelson

81. “130. We cannot read the darkness. We cannot read it. It is a form of madness, albeit a common one, that we try.”

— Maggie Nelson

82. “Whereas an art that affects you in the moment, but which you then find hard to remember, is straining to bring you to another level. It offers images or ideas from that other level, that other way of being, which is why you find them hard to remember. But it has opened you to the possibility of growing into what you are not yet, which is exactly what art should do.”

— Maggie Nelson

83. “Sometimes one has to know something many times over. Sometimes one forgets, and then remembers. And then forgets, and then remembers. And then forgets again.”

— Maggie Nelson

84. “I know what I want is impossible. If I can make my language flat enough, exact enough, if I can rinse each sentence clean enough, like washing a stone over and over again in river water, if I can find the right perch or crevice from which to record everything, if I can give myself enough white space, maybe I could do it. I could tell you this story while walking out of this story. I could – it all could – just disappear.”

— Maggie Nelson

85. “I feel at once the need to die and be reborn one thousand years ago.”

— Maggie Nelson

86. “I was so happy renting in New York City for so long because renting – or at least the way I rented, which involved never lifting a finger to better my surroundings – allows you to let things literally fall apart all around you. Then, when it gets to be too much, you just move on.”

— Maggie Nelson

87. “And if ‘saturation’ means that one simply could not absorb or contain one single drop more, why does ‘saturation’ not bring with it a connotation of satisfaction, either in concept, or in experience?”

— Maggie Nelson

88. “I stopped smugly repeating ‘Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly’ and wondered anew, can everything be thought.”

— Maggie Nelson

89. “But really justice has no coordinates, no teleology.”

— Maggie Nelson

90. “The tepid ‘there must be a reason for it’ notion sometimes floated by religious or quasi-religious acquaintances or bystanders, is, to her, another form of violence. She has not time for it. She is too busy asking, in this changed form, what makes a livable life, and how she can live it.”

— Maggie Nelson

91. “She is trying to get me to see that although I thought I loved this man very completely for exactly who he was, I was in fact blind to the man he actually was, or is.”

— Maggie Nelson

92. “But while the color may sap appetite in the most literal sense, it feeds it in others.”

— Maggie Nelson

93. “The Oblivion Seekers, a collection one critic has described as “one of the strangest human documents that a woman has given to the world.”

— Maggie Nelson

94. “Once something is no longer illicit, punishable, pathologized, or used as lawful basis for raw discrimination or acts of violence, that phenomenon will no longer be able to represent or deliver on subversion, the subcultural, the underground, the fringe, in the same way.”

— Maggie Nelson

95. “Stop working against the world, I counseled myself. Love the one you’re with. Love the color green. But I did not love the green, nor did I want to have to love it or pretend to love it. The most I can say is that I abided it.”

— Maggie Nelson

96. “I feel high on the knowledge that I can talk as much as I want to, as quickly as I want to, in any direction that I want to, without anyone overtly rolling her eyes at me or suggesting I go to speech therapy. I’m not saying this is good pedagogy. I am saying that its pleasures are deep.”

— Maggie Nelson

97. “Fifteen days after we are born, we begin to discriminate between colors. For the rest of our lives, barring blunted or blinded sight, we find ourselves face-to-face with all these phenomena at once, and we call the whole shimmering mess “color.” You might even say that it is the business of the eye to make colored forms out of what is essentially shimmering. This is how we “get around” in the world. Some might also call it the source of our suffering.”

— Maggie Nelson

98. “But this time, so far as I can tell, my mother has not made her husband her desire incarnate, though she does love him very much. And for his part, so far as I can tell, he doesn’t try to talk her out of her self-deprecation, nor does he abet it. He simply loves her. I am learning from him.”

— Maggie Nelson

99. “There is simply no way that a year from now you’re going to feel the way you feel today”, a different therapist said to me last year at this time. But though I have learned to act as if I feel differently, the truth is that my feelings haven’t really changed.”

— Maggie Nelson

100. “Last night I wept in a way I haven’t wept for some time. I wept until I aged myself. I watched it happen in the mirror. I watched the lines arrive around my eyes like engraved sunbursts; it was like watching flowers open in time-lapse on a windowsill. The tears not only aged my face, they also changed its texture, turned the skin of my cheeks into putty. I recognized this as a rite of decadence, but I did not know how to stop it.”

— Maggie Nelson