Quotes From "Bluets" By Maggie Nelson

After my friend's accident I take care of her. It...
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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
102. After my friend's accident I take care of her....
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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
Mostly I have felt myself becoming a servant of sadness....
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Mostly I have felt myself becoming a servant of sadness. I am still looking for the beauty in that. Maggie Nelson
It will not say, 'Isn't X beautiful?' Such demands are...
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It will not say, 'Isn't X beautiful?' Such demands are murderous to beauty. Maggie Nelson
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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
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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
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We’re only given as much as the heart can endure, ” “What does not kill you makes you stronger, ” “Our sorrows provide us with the lessons we most need to learn”: these are the kinds of phrases that enrage my injured friend. Indeed, one would be hard-pressed to come up with a spiritual lesson that demands becoming a quadriparalytic. 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 no 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
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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. You have to stand there, spade in hand, cold whiskey sweat beaded on your brow, eyes misshapen and wild, some sorry-ass grave digger grown bone-tired of the trade. You have to stand there in the dirty rut you dug, alone in the darkness, in all its pulsing quiet, surrounded by the scandal of corpses. . Maggie Nelson
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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
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I want you to know, if you ever read this, there was a time when I would rather have had you by my side than any one of these words; I would rather have had you by my side than all the blue in the world. But now you are talking as if love were a consolation. Simone Weil warned otherwise. 'Love is not consolation, ' she wrote. 'It is light.' All right then, let me try to rephrase. When I was alive, I aimed to be a student not of longing but of light. Maggie Nelson
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238. I want you to know, if you ever read this, there was a time when I would rather have had you by my side than any one of these words; I would rather have had you by my side than all the blue in the world.239. 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. All right then, let me try to rephrase. When I was alive, I aimed to be a student not of longing but of light. Maggie Nelson
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Eventually I confess to a friend some details about my weeping–its intensity, its frequency. She says (kindly) that she thinks we sometimes weep in front of a mirror not to inflame self-pity, but because we want to feel witnessed in our despair. Maggie Nelson
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92. Eventually I confess to a friend some details about my weeping–its intensity, its frequency. She says (kindly) that she thinks we sometimes weep in front of a mirror not to inflame self-pity, but because we want to feel witnessed in our despair. Maggie Nelson
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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
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For the fact is that neuroscientists who study memory remain unclear on the question of whether each time we remember something we are accessing a stable “memory fragment”–often called a “trace” or an “engram”–or whether each time we remember something we are literally creating a new “trace” to house the thought. And since no one has yet been able to discern the material of these traces, nor to locate them in the brain, how one thinks of them remains mostly a matter of metaphor: they could be “scribbles, ” “holograms, ” or “imprints”; they could live in “spirals, ” “rooms, ” or “storage units.” Personally, when I imagine my mind in the act of remembering, I see Mickey Mouse in Fantasia, roving about in a milky, navy-blue galaxy shot through with twinkling cartoon stars. Maggie Nelson
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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
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I am trying to talk about what blue means, or what it means to me, apart from meaning. Maggie Nelson
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Do not, however, make the mistake of thinking that all desire is yearning. Maggie Nelson
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We don't get to choose what or whom we love, I want to say. We just don't get to choose. Maggie Nelson
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To take a breath of water: does the thought panic or excite you? Maggie Nelson
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Perhaps I had inadvertently brushed up against the Buddhist axiom, that enlightenment is the ultimate disappointment. Maggie Nelson