Maggie Nelson citations

“Mostly I have felt myself becoming a servant of sadness. I am still looking for the beauty in that.”

“Loneliness is solitude with a problem.”

“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.”

“53. '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. But I am not willing to go there-not just yet. I believed in you.”

“The moment of queer pride is a refusal to be shamed by witnessing the other as being ashamed of you.”

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

“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.”