{"author":"Maggie Nelson","author_id":"Maggie+Nelson","total_quotes":45,"quotes":[{"text":"Do not, however, make the mistake of thinking that all desire is yearning.","author":"Maggie Nelson","tags":["desire"],"id":7367,"author_id":"Maggie+Nelson"},{"text":"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.","author":"Maggie Nelson","tags":["blue","bluets","color","colour","light","love","maggie-nelson","nelson","simone-weil","weil"],"id":13188,"author_id":"Maggie+Nelson"},{"text":"Misogyny, when expressed or explored by men, remains a timeless classic.","author":"Maggie Nelson","tags":["feminism"],"id":14963,"author_id":"Maggie+Nelson"},{"text":"Am I sitting here now, months later, in Los Angeles, writing all this down, because I want my life to matter? Maybe so. But I don't want it to matter more than others. I want to remember, or to learn, how to live as if it matters, as if they all matter, even if they don't.","author":"Maggie Nelson","tags":["empathy","equality","the-golden-rule","truth","we-re-all-in-this-together"],"id":15839,"author_id":"Maggie+Nelson"},{"text":"To take a breath of water: does the thought panic or excite you?","author":"Maggie Nelson","tags":["breathing","excitement","panic","water"],"id":21480,"author_id":"Maggie+Nelson"},{"text":"It is always taking care, but it is difficult, because at times to take care of her is also to cause her pain.","author":"Maggie Nelson","tags":["pain"],"id":27614,"author_id":"Maggie+Nelson"},{"text":"For blue has no mind. It is not wise, nor does it promise any wisdom. It is beautiful, and despite what the poets and philosophers and theologians have said, I think beauty neither obscures truth nor reveals it. Likewise, it leads neither towards justice nor away from it. It is pharmakon. It radiates.","author":"Maggie Nelson","tags":["beauty","truth"],"id":38949,"author_id":"Maggie+Nelson"},{"text":"I like writing that puts the needle right into the vein. I don’t think, when I’m writing, “Tell a good story” or “find a meaning.” I’m thinking phrase by phrase, make it tight, make it good. Get the idea out in language I can bear. I think there’s something musical about being impatient with boring sentences—it’s not that I don’t have boring sentences, God knows I do, but I’m impatient with them.","author":"Maggie Nelson","tags":["writer","writing"],"id":39237,"author_id":"Maggie+Nelson"},{"text":"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.","author":"Maggie Nelson","tags":["motherhood"],"id":61043,"author_id":"Maggie+Nelson"},{"text":"I remember, around age ten, beholding the scene in The Shining in which the hot young woman whom Jack Nicholson is lewdly embracing in the haunted hotel bathroom ages rapidly in his arms, screeching from nubile chick to putrefying corpse within seconds. I understood that the scene was supposed to represent some kind of primal horror. This was The Shining, after all. But the image of that decaying, cackling crone, her arms outstretched in desire toward the man who is backing away, has stayed with me for three decades, as a type of friend. She’s part baths-ghost, part mad-Naomi. She didn’t get the memo about being beyond wanting or being wanted. Or perhaps she just means to scare the shit out of him, which she does.","author":"Maggie Nelson","tags":["aging","women"],"id":64402,"author_id":"Maggie+Nelson"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":45,"pages":5,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}