Quotes by Maggie Nelson - Page 1

I don't ever believe in violence as a kind of medicine.
Maggie Nelson / Poet
Believe
Medicine
Violence
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I don't think there's any formula for what makes great art.
Maggie Nelson / Poet
Art
Great Art
Thinking
Formula
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It's a lot easier to write about people when you're not living with them!
Maggie Nelson / Poet
People
Writing
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In life and art, there are distinctions to be made between what an act of cruelty consists of.
Maggie Nelson / Poet
Art
Cruelty
Distinction
Made
Consists
Distinctions
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We're all human beings with bodily needs living within a system. We don't need to prove that we're not a part of the fabric of the culture in order to want to change it.
Maggie Nelson / Poet
Culture
Prove
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Art to me is not precious enough that I feel territorial about what the word gets applied to. Conversations about what counts as art and what doesn't doesn't captivate my attention very much.
Maggie Nelson / Poet
Art
Attention
Enough
Territorial
Applied
Conversations
Counts
Art Me Feel
Precious
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I have been trying, for some time now, to find dignity in my loneliness. I have been finding this hard to do. It is easier, of course, to find dignity in one's solitude. Loneliness is solitude with a problem.
Maggie Nelson / Poet
Loneliness
Solitude
Trying
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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 / Poet
Beautiful
Bird
Heart
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Our kids just aren't living in the same generation, and if they're not introduced to gender identity as a problem, they won't internalize them as a problem. Which isn't to say they won't meet bigotry in their lives.
Maggie Nelson / Poet
Kids
Identity
Problem
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Is it exciting to have a codified identity, which then gets a codified set of rights and recognitions and visibility? Are we supposed to take it from there, within the same system? Or are we trying to upset the table before we want a place at it?
Maggie Nelson / Poet
Identity
Trying
Upset
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Yes, I'm writing about motherhood, but I bristle a little bit, especially living with someone whose parenting falls between the cracks of what the culture is ready to recognize as mothering or fathering, but who most certainly is an excellent parent.
Maggie Nelson / Poet
Fall
Motherhood
Writing
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labels can be fun! Some people are like, "As a card-carrying bear, where I also have a little bit of fairy in me..." People have fun collaging these; there's a fun people have with their identifications. The irony of them can be lost if you're just wholeheartedly anti-identitarian.
Maggie Nelson / Poet
Fun
Irony
People
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I'm not sure how to put this, but I didn't want things like gender transition to be, like, the money shot in talking about bodily change. The truth is that we are all changing all the time to each other. Anybody who's been in a relationship for more than a year, more than five years, knows this.
Maggie Nelson / Poet
Gender
Not Sure
Truth Is
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I feel excited in that I think boys born to feminists have a leg up. At least, the ones I've met seem like they do. There's something really vital about that exchange. I think I'd only imagined, beforehand, handing down a feminism to a young girl. But I'm newly excited by the challenge of raising a boy.
Maggie Nelson / Poet
Girl
Boys
Thinking
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I love language. It doesn't bother me that its effects are partial. To me that is very sanity-producing. It would be weird if the effects of language were more than partial, if your whole life existed within your texts. That would be much scarier to me than language being an inadequate tool to represent.
Maggie Nelson / Poet
Bother
Language
Whole Life
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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 / Poet
Blue
Loneliness
Solitude
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Most of the bio men on earth were born to women, so it's pretty ordinary! But I think because I had come from a matriarchy - my father died when I was young, and I only have a sister and a stepsister - when I told my mom and my sister that I was having a boy, they were both like, "That does not compute within our family relation!" It was like, "Girls only here!" Now that all seems very strange to me.
Maggie Nelson / Poet
Girl
Mom
Father
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I know that a lot of feminist fears about the trans movement have been, "Wait, we never got to the part where we focus on women! We tried for a minute, but we don't want to lose the category all of a sudden. We haven't heard yet from the females with children called mothers, we haven't heard yet from all these groups!" On the one hand I'm very sympathetic to that, but the category of Women or Mothers, any of these categories, are on shifting sands and always have been.
Maggie Nelson / Poet
Children
Feminist
Mother
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For pragmatic reasons, for lessening of violence and for allowing people to live better lives, I think that the march forward for GLBTQ+ rights is a worthwhile one. But for me, hopefully the frontier is alliance-making across all the social issues, whereby people can get over whatever prejudices they're holding in order to keep their eyes on making livable lives for people in all states of vulnerability, no matter what their gender, sexuality, race, class, origin, whatever.
Maggie Nelson / Poet
Eye
People
Thinking
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Not to be too doctrinaire, but we live in the patriarchy! And therefore anything explicitly associated with the female gender, including motherhood, needs to be defensively claimed, because it's either devalued or sentimentally idealized, but not supported. I so thoroughly believe that female human beings have worth that I don't feel the need to argue it, but I think that there's a part of me that very specifically wants to make space for those ideas to be centralized, if only for the moment.
Maggie Nelson / Poet
Believe
Motherhood
Thinking
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There's that layering of selves that we can have with someone else across a long relationship. I go to the baths, the Korean spa. I love looking at the maps of people's bodies. The women have so many mastectomy scars and ectopic pregnancy scars and stretch marks, and all these things are amazing and wondrous to me. I guess I find it stranger not to attend to flux than to attend to it. But in a relationship it's also scary - you don't know where you're going to end up when you go through change.
Maggie Nelson / Poet
Long
Pregnancy
Scary
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I think writing kind of burns out the flaming question. Sometimes it might feel like when you're living with certain paradoxes and they're unarticulated, you feel pressure to choose. I feel more comfortable living in the paradoxes that I've named and laid out, whereas when I started they might have felt like real agitations. At least I see them more clearly after having sketched them for myself and made a place to stand in relationship to them that felt okay enough to last through the course of a book.
Maggie Nelson / Poet
Book
Real
Writing
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Whenever you get involved with talking about rights, you're talking about being a citizen. You're talking about being a citizen in capitalism; you're talking about what rights are granted to what identities, under what laws, and all that is a big mix. Marriage is, among many other things, a formality to channel capital through a family. And that's why the big DOMA lawsuit was about paying too many taxes! "I wouldn't have had to pay all these taxes if Theodora had been Theo" - that was the big tagline. It's all about protecting assets.
Maggie Nelson / Poet
Granted
Identity
Taxes
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Maggie Nelson Quotes - Page 1

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