Top 120 Maggie Nelson Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “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

102. “But is there really such a thing as nothing, as nothingness? I don’t now. I know we’re still here, who knows for how long, ablaze with our care, its ongoing song.”

— Maggie Nelson

103. “102. After my friend’s accident I take care of her. It is always taking care, but it is difficult, because at times to take care of her is also to cause her pain.”

— Maggie Nelson

104. “During our first forays out as a couple, I blushed a lot, felt dizzy with my luck, unable to contain the nearly exploding fact that I’ve so obviously gotten everything I’d ever wanted, everything there was to get. Handsome, brilliant, quick-witted, articulate, forceful, you. We spent hours and hours on the red couch, giggling, The happiness police are going to come and arrest us if we go on this way. Arrest us for our luck.”

— Maggie Nelson

105. “And certainly there are many speakers whom I’d like to see do more trembling, more unknowing, more apologizing.”

— Maggie Nelson

106. “While the two words often arrive sutured together, I think it worthwhile to breathe some space between them, so that one might see “brutal honesty” not as a more forceful version of honesty itself, but as one possible use of honesty. One that doesn’t necessarily lay truth barer by dint of force, but that actually overlays something on top of it – something that can get in its way. That something is cruelty.”

— Maggie Nelson

107. “We struggled to understand how a contract with the so-called secular state could mandate some kind of spiritual ritual.”

— Maggie Nelson

108. “We ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold. We ought to, but we don’t – or at least, we don’t quite as readily. But the more you do, the more quickly you can recognize the feeling when it comes around again, and hopefully you won’t need to stare as long.”

— Maggie Nelson

109. “As it turned out, my fears were unwarranted. Which isn’t to say you haven’t changed. But the biggest change of all has been a measure of peace. The peace is not total, but in the face of a suffocating anxiety, a measure of peace is no small thing.”

— Maggie Nelson

110. “I just don’t feel like you’re trying hard enough,” one friend says to me. How can I tell her that not trying has become the whole point, the whole plan? That is to say, I have been trying to go limp in the face of my heartache, as another friend says he does in the face of his anxiety. Think of it as an act of civil disobedience, he says. Let the police peel you up. I have been trying to place myself in a land of great sunshine, and abandon my will therewith.”

— Maggie Nelson

111. “187. Is it a related form of aggrandizement, to inflate a heartbreak into a sort of allegory? Losing what one loves is simpler, more common, than that. More precise. One could leave it, too, as it is. – Yet how can I explain, that every time I put a pin in the balloon of it, the balloon seems to swell back up as soon as I turn away from it?”

— Maggie Nelson

112. “Most of my writing usually feels to me like a bad idea, which makes it hard for me to know which ideas feel bad because they have merit, and which ones feel bad because they don’t.”

— Maggie Nelson

113. “It will not say, ‘Isn’t X beautiful?’ Such demands are murderous to beauty.”

— Maggie Nelson

114. “14. I have enjoyed telling people that I am writing a book about blue without actually doing it.”

— Maggie Nelson

115. “If there’s one thing homonormativity reveals, it’s the troubling fact that you can be victimized and in no way be radical; it happens very often among homosexuals as with every other oppressed minority.”

— Maggie Nelson

116. “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. But is there really such a thing as nothing, as nothingness? I don’t know. I know we’re still here, who knows for how long, ablaze with our care, its ongoing song.”

— Maggie Nelson

117. “According to Dionysius, the Divine Darkness appears dark only because it is so dazzlingly bright – a paradox I have attempted to understand by looking directly at the sun and noticing the dark spot that flowers at its center. But as compelling as this paradox, or this experiment, may be, I am not as interested in it as I am the fact that in Christian iconography, this “dazzling darkness” appears with startling regularity as blue.”

— Maggie Nelson

118. “As her time grew near, your brother took her in. His family situation was under strain, but at least she had a bed there, her own room. It was almost good enough. But really none of it was good enough, even though it was better than many get. When she began to lose consciousness, your brother had her moved to a local hospice; you flew there in the dead of night, desperate to get there in time, so that she wouldn’t die alone.”

— Maggie Nelson

119. “For it isn’t just moments of happiness, which is all I thought we got. It’s happiness that spreads.”

— Maggie Nelson

120. “Misogyny, when expressed or explored by men, remains a timeless classic.”

— Maggie Nelson

121. “I am trying to talk about what blue means, or what it means to me, apart from meaning.”

— Maggie Nelson

122. “When we take Iggy to the doctor together now, the nurse always says how happy it makes her to see a father helping out with a baby. ‘I’m certainly doing their team a lot of favors’, you mutter.”

— Maggie Nelson

123. “Write the things which thou hast seen, and the things which are, and the things which shall be hereafter. A red part.”

— Maggie Nelson

124. “I am not yet sure how to sever the love from the lover without occasioning some degree of carnage.”

— Maggie Nelson

125. “Because we tend – often correctly – to associate unfreedom with the presence of oppressive circumstances that we can and should work to change, it makes sense that we might instinctively treat the knot of freedom and unfreedom as a source of perfidy and pain. To expose how domination disguises itself as liberation, we become compelled to pull the strands of the knot apart, aiming to extricate the emancipatory from the oppressive.”

— Maggie Nelson

126. “This is one of the things I’ve learned about happiness: when you feel it, it’s good to say so. That way, if and when you say later in depression or despair, “I’ve just never been happy,” there will be a trail of audible testimony in your wake indicating otherwise.”

— Maggie Nelson

127. “Look for yourself, and ask not what has been real and what has been false, but what has been bitter, and what has been sweet.”

— Maggie Nelson

128. “This is a simple story, but it spooks me, insofar as it reminds me that the eye is simply a recorder, with or without our will. Perhaps the same could be said of the heart. But whether there is a violence at work here remains undecided.”

— Maggie Nelson

129. “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.”

— Maggie Nelson

130. “And who is to say this afterimage is not equally real? Indigo makes its stain not in the dyeing vat, but after the garment has been removed. It is the oxygen of the air that blues it.”

— Maggie Nelson

131. “Instantaneous, noncalibrated, digital self-revelation is one of my greatest nightmares.”

— Maggie Nelson

132. “So long as we exalt artists as beautiful liars or as the world’s most profound truth-tellers, we remain locked in a moralistic paradigm that doesn’t even begin to engage art’s most exciting provinces.”

— Maggie Nelson

133. “Nonetheless, as Billie Holiday knew, it remains the case that to see blue in deeper and deeper saturation is eventually to move toward darkness.”

— Maggie Nelson

134. “Once we name something, you said, we can never see it the same way again. All that is unnameable falls away, gets lost, is murdered. You called this the cookie-cutter function of our minds. You said that you knew this not from shunning language but from immersion in it, on the screen, in conversation, onstage, on the page.”

— Maggie Nelson

135. “I have sometimes found myself wondering if the same principle applies in other realms – if seeing a particularly astonishing shade of blue, for example, or letting a particularly potent person inside you, could alter you irrevocably, just to have seen or felt it. In which case, how does one know when, or how, to refuse? How to recover?”

— Maggie Nelson

136. “I seem only happy when I’m eating or reading.”

— Maggie Nelson

137. “We mainly suppose the experiential quality to be an intrinsic quality of the physical object” – this is the so-called systematic illusion of color. Perhaps it is also that of love.”

— Maggie Nelson

138. “Treating things lightly is indeed the answer to so much.”

— Maggie Nelson

139. “IN ONE OF his last psychoanalytic papers, D. W. Winnicott wrote: Fear of breakdown is the fear of a breakdown that has already been experienced.”

— Maggie Nelson