Maggie Nelson Quotes

At times I fake my enthusiasm. At others, I fear I am incapable of communicating the depth of it. ~ Maggie Nelson

There are people out there who get annoyed at the story that Djuna barnes, rather than identify as a lesbian, preferred to say that she 'just loved Thelma.' Gertrude Stein reputedly made similar claims, albeit not in those exact terms, about Alice. I get why it's politically maddening, but I've also always thought it a little romantic - the romance of letting an individual experience of desire take precedence over a categorical one. ~ Maggie Nelson

Pharmakon means drug, but as Jacques Derrida and others have pointed out, the word in Greek famously refuses to designate whether poison or cure. It holds both in the bowl. ~ Maggie Nelson

88. 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 all learn to say: That's my depression talking. It's not "me." 89. As if we could scrape the color off the iris and still see. 90. ~ Maggie Nelson

A day or two after my love pronouncement, now feral with vulnerability, I sent you the passage from Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes in which Barthes describes how the subject who utters the phrase "I love you" is like "the Argonaut renewing his ship during its voyage without changing its name." Just as the Argo's parts may be replaced over time but the boat is still called the Argo, whenever the lover utters the phrase "I love you," its meaning must be renewed by each use, as "the very task of love and of language is to give to one and the same phrase inflections which will be forever new. ~ Maggie Nelson

Misogyny, when expressed or explored by men, remains a timeless classic. ~ Maggie Nelson

But whatever sameness I've noted in my relationships with women is not the sameness of Woman, and certainly not the sameness of parts. Rather, it is the shared, crushing understanding of what it means to live in a patriarchy. ~ Maggie Nelson

You, reader, are alive today, reading this, because someone once adequately policed your mouth exploring. ~ Maggie Nelson

If I were today on my deathbed, I would name my love of the color blue and making love with you as two of the sweetest sensations I knew on this earth. ~ Maggie Nelson

I awoke from this nightmare into a freezing cold motel room: the heater had broken at some point during the night, and the fan was now blowing icy air into the room.

At first I tried to keep warm under the crappy motel bedspread by thinking about the man I loved. At the time he was traveling in Europe, and was thus unreachable. I didn't know it yet, but as I lay there, he was traveling with another woman. Does it matter now? I tried hard to feel his body wrapped tightly around mine.

Next I tried to imagine everyone I had ever loved, and everyone who had ever loved me, wrapped around me. I tried to feel that I was the composite of all these people, instead of alone in a shitty motel room with a broken heater somewhere outside of Detroit, a few miles from where Jane's body was dumped thirty-six years ago on a March night just like this one.

'Need each other as much as you can bear,' writes Eileen Myles. 'Everywhere you go in the world.'

I felt the wild need for any or all of these people that night. Lying there alone, I began to feel - perhaps even to know - that I did not exist apart from their love and need of me.

Of this latter I felt less sure, but it seemed possible, if the equation worked both ways.

Falling asleep I thought, 'Maybe this, for me, is the hand of God. ~ Maggie Nelson

But this time, so far as I can tell, my mother has not made her husband her desire incarnate, though she does love him very much. And for his part, so far as I can tell, he doesn't try to talk her out of her self-deprecation, nor does he abet it. He simply loves her. I am learning from him. ~ Maggie Nelson

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. I have heard that this pain can be converted, as it were, by accepting "the fundamental impermanence of all things." This acceptance bewilders me: sometimes it seems an act of will; at others, of surrender. Often I feel myself to be rocking between them (seasickness). ~ Maggie Nelson

Mother and her entire family line are obsessed with skinniness as an indicator of physical, moral, and economic fitness. ~ Maggie Nelson

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. 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

I feel I can give you everything without giving myself away, I whispered in your basement bed. If one does one's solitude right, this is the prize. ~ Maggie Nelson

It's not possible to live twenty-four hours a day soaked in the immediate awareness of one's sex. Gendered self-consciousness has, mercifully, a flickering nature. ~ Denise Riley

Mostly I have felt myself becoming a servant of sadness. I am still looking for the beauty in that. ~ Maggie Nelson

I feel at once the need to die and be reborn one thousand years ago. ~ Maggie Nelson

I know what I want is impossible. If I can make my language flat enough, exact enough, if I can rinse each sentence clean enough, like washing a stone over and over again in river water, if I can find the right perch or crevice from which to record everything, if I can give myself enough white space, maybe I could do it. I could tell you this story while walking out of this story. I could - it all could - just disappear. ~ Maggie Nelson

I am not interested in a hermeneutics, or an erotics, or a metaphorics, of my anus. I am interested in ass-fucking. I am interested in the fact that the clitoris, disguised as a discrete button, sweeps over the entire area like a manta ray, impossible to tell where its eight thousand nerves begin and end. I am interested in the fact that the human anus is one of the most innervated parts of the body, ~ Maggie Nelson

I'm not on my way anywhere, Harry sometimes tells inquirers. How to explain, in a culture frantic for resolution, that sometimes the shit stays messy? I do not want the female gender that has been assigned to me at birth. Neither do I want the male gender that transsexual medicine can furnish and that the state will award me if I behave in the right way. I don't want any of it. How to explain that for some, or for some at some times, this irresolution is OK - desirable, even (e.g., "gender hackers") - whereas for others, or for others at some times, it stays a source of conflict or grief? ~ Maggie Nelson

Loneliness is solitude with a problem. ~ Maggie Nelson

I was so happy renting in New York City for so long because renting - or at least the way I rented, which involved never lifting a finger to better my surroundings - allows you to let things literally fall apart all around you. Then, when it gets to be too much, you just move on. ~ Maggie Nelson

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. ~ Maggie Nelson

If he hadn't lied to you, he would have been a different person than he is.' She is trying to get me to see that although I thought I loved this man very completely for exactly who he was, I was in fact blind to the man he actually was, or is. ~ Maggie Nelson

You've punctured my solitude, I told you. ~ Maggie Nelson

[H]ow the force of one's adolescent curiosity and incipient lust often must war with the need to protect oneself from disgusting and wicked violators, how pleasure can coexist with awful degradation without meaning the degradation was justified or a species of wish fulfillment; how it feels to be both accomplice and victim; and how such ambivalences can live on in an adult sexual life. ~ Maggie Nelson

The time for blithely asserting that sleeping with whomever you want however you want is going to jam its machinery is long past. ~ Maggie Nelson

That's what we both hate about fiction, or at least crappy fiction - it purports to provide occasions for thinking through complex issues, but really it has predetermined the positions, stuffed a narrative full of false choices, and hooked you on them, rendering you less able to see out, to get out. ~ Maggie Nelson

It calms me to think of blue as the color of death. I have long imagined death's approch as the swell of a wave - a towering wall of blue. You will drown, the world tells me, has always told me. You will descend into a blue underworld, blue with hungry ghosts, Krishna blue, the blue faces of the ones you loved. They all drowned, too. To take a breath of water: does the thought panic or excite you? If you are in love with red then you slit or shoot. If you are in love with blue you fill your pouch with stones good for sucking and head down to the river. Any river will do. ~ Maggie Nelson

In the wake of the Patriot Act, during the second administration of George W., you made a series of small, handheld weapons. The rule was that each weapon had to be assembled from household items within minutes. You'd been gay-bashed before, two black eyes while waiting in line for a burrito (you ran after him, of course). Now you thought, if the government comes for its citizens, we should be prepared, even if our weapons are pathetic. Your art-weapons included a steak knife affixed to a bottle of ranch dressing and mounted on an axe handle, a dirty sock sprouting nails, a wooden stump with a clump of urethane resin stuck to one end with dull bolts protruding from it, and more. ~ Maggie Nelson

58. "Love is something so ugly that the human race would die out if lovers could see what they were doing" (Leonardo da Vinci). ~ Maggie Nelson

WHAT IT IS
It is what
it is. But
what is it?
What it is
Some soft
tautology
whose terms
are touch
Time to give, time
to give it up. ~ Maggie Nelson

This slice of truth, offered in the final hour, ended up beginning a new chapter of my adulthood, the one in which I realized that age doesn't necessarily bring anything with it, save itself. The rest is optional. ~ Maggie Nelson

Perhaps because I have spent hours sermonizing to students about the sins of the passive voice - how it can obfuscate meaning, deaden vitality, and abandon the task of assigning agency or responsibility - I find the grammar of justice maddening. It's always "rendered," "served," or "done." It always swoops down from on high - from God, from the state - like a bolt of lightning, a flaming sword come to separate the righteous from the wicked in Earth's final hour. It is not, apparently, something we can give to one other, something we can make happen, something we can create together down here in the muck. The problem may also lie in the word itself, as for millennia "justice" has meant both "retribution" and "equality," as if a gaping chasm did not separate the two.

If you really want to know what justice is, don't only ask questions and then score off anyone who answers, and refute him, roars Thrasymachus to Socrates in The Republic. You know very well that it is much easier to ask questions than to answer them. Give an answer yourself and tell us what you say justice is. When justice is done, writes Anne Carson, the world drops away. This does not seem to me a happy thought. I am not yet sure I want the world to drop away. ~ Maggie Nelson

That the notion of privilege as something to which one could "easily cop," as in "cop to once and be done with," is ridiculous. Privilege saturates, privilege structures. ~ Maggie Nelson

Oh, how often have I cursed those foolish pages of mine which made my youthful sufferings public property! Goethe wrote years after the publication of The Sorrows of Young Werther. ~ Maggie Nelson

How does one get across the fact that the best way to find out how people feel about their gender or their sexuality - or anything else, really - is to listen to what they tell you, and to try to treat them accordingly, without shellacking over their version of reality with yours? ~ Maggie Nelson

I remember that day very clearly: I had received a phone call. A friend had been in an accident. Perhaps she would not live. She had very little face, and her spine was broken in two places. She had not yet moved; the doctor described her as "a pebble in water." I walked around Brooklyn and noticed that the faded peri-winkle of the abandoned Mobil gas station on the corner was suddenly blooming. In the baby-shit yellow showers at my gym, where snow sometimes fluttered in through the cracked gated windows, I noticed that the yellow paint was peeling in spots, and a decent, industrial blue was trying to creep in. At the bottom of the swimming pool, I watched the white winter light spangle the cloudy blue and I knew together they made God. When I walked into my friend's hospital room, her eyes were a piercing, pale blue and the only part of her body that could move. I was scared. So was she. The blue was beating. ~ Maggie Nelson

Why should I feel lonely? is not our planet in the Milky Way? (Thoreau). ~ Maggie Nelson

Is to be in love with blue, then, to be in love with a disturbance? Or is the love itself the disturbance? And what kind of madness is it anyway, to be in love with something constitutionally incapable of loving you back? ~ Maggie Nelson

48. Imagine, for example, someone who fucks like a whore. Someone who seems good at it, professional. Someone you can still see fucking you, in the mirror, always in the mirror, crazy fucking about three feet away, in an apartment lit by blue light, never lit by daylight, this person is always fucking you from behind in blue light and you both always seem good at it, dedicated and lost unto it, as if there is no other activity on God's given earth your bodies know how to do except fuck and be fucked like this, in this dim blue light, in this mirror. What do you call someone who fucks this way? ~ Maggie Nelson

Afterward (or, The Bridge)

Because desire always exceeds
its object. Because the energy you gave me

feels big enough to birth wings. Because
I want you to push into the wetness

and I know it. Because of the salt
and the wind. Because everything

that is supposed to happen
will happen, is happening, or

has already happened. Because
ambivalence is more beautiful

than justice. Because my heart is
shooting ahead, and I have no choice

but to follow it. Because I want you
to be happy, with or without me.

Because of the birds fleeing the storm.
Because the harbor is permeable

and shining. Because it felt like
that last night of my life

but it wasn't. Because a web of cables
is there to catch me if I blow

sideways, and always will be. Because
I walked across the bridge and was free. ~ Maggie Nelson

She asks him quietly in the dark to tell her about the mother of everything and he did not know of whom she was speaking.
She asked the volcano and the volcano belched great streams of wet ash.
She lay her head down with fatigue and found her head on a pillow of ink.
Upon waking she stretched her arms around the glob and found her fingers weren't even close to touching. ~ Maggie Nelson

In life and art, there are distinctions to be made between what an act of cruelty consists of. ~ Maggie Nelson

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

Psychoanalysis gets interesting when it shifts the focus from making us more intelligible to ourselves to helping us become more curious about how strange we really are. And so, I would argue, does art. ~ Maggie Nelson

It's the binary of normative/transgressive that's unsustainable, along with the demand that anyone live a life that's all one thing. ~ Maggie Nelson

And we have not yet heard enough, if anything, about the female gaze. About the scorch of it, with the eyes staying in the head. ~ Maggie Nelson

Even identical genital acts mean very different things to different people. This is a crucial point to remember, and also a difficult one. It reminds us that there is difference right where we may be looking for, and expecting, communion. ~ Maggie Nelson

I think my mother is beautiful. But her negative feelings about her body can generate a force field that repels any appreciation of it. I've long known the drill: Boobs, too small. Butt, too big. Face, bird-like. Upper arms, old. But it's not just age - she even disparages the way she looks in baby pictures. I don't know why she has never seen herself as beautiful. I think I've been waiting all these years for her to do so, as if that kind of self-love would somehow offer her body to me. But now I realize - she already gave it to me. At times I imagine her in death, and I know that her body, in all its details, will flood me. I do not know how I will survive it. ~ Maggie Nelson

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. ~ Maggie Nelson

But the tacit undercurrent of her argument, as I felt it, was that Gallop's maternity had rotted her mind - besotted it with the narcissism that makes one think that an utterly ordinary experience shared by countless others is somehow unique, or uniquely interesting. ~ Maggie Nelson

The happiness police are going to come and arrest us if we go on this way. Arrest us for our luck. ~ Maggie Nelson

In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art. ~ Maggie Nelson

I suppose it is possible that one day we will meet again and it will feel as if nothing ever happened between us. ~ Maggie Nelson

125. Of course, you could just take off the blindfold and say, 'I think this game is stupid and I'm not playing it anymore.' And it must also be admitted that hitting the wall or wandering off in the wrong direction or tearing off the blindfold is as much a part of the game as is pinning the tail on the donkey. ~ Maggie Nelson

Silverman also contends that a baby's demands on the mother can be very flattering to the mother's narcissism, since it attributes to her the capacity to satisfy her infant's lack, and so - by extension - her own. Since most women in our culture are egoically wounded, the temptation to bathe in the sun of this idealization often proves irresistible. ~ Maggie Nelson

I feel high on the knowledge that I can talk as much as I want to, as quickly as I want to, in any direction that I want to, without anyone overtly rolling her eyes at me or suggesting I go to speech therapy. I'm not saying this is good pedagogy. I am saying that its pleasures are deep. ~ Maggie Nelson

You pass as a guy; I, as pregnant. Our waiter cheerfully tells us about his family, expresses delight in ours. On the surface, it may have seemed as though your body was becoming more and more "male," mine, more and more "female." But that's not how it felt on the inside. On the inside, we were two human animals undergoing transformations beside each other, bearing each other loose witness. In other words, we were aging. ~ Maggie Nelson

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

I don't think there's any formula for what makes great art. ~ Maggie Nelson

To devote yourself to someone else's pussy can be a means of devoting yourself to your own. ~ Maggie Nelson

Barthes found the exit to this merry-go-round by reminding himself that "it is language which is assertive, not he." It is absurd, Barthes says, to try to flee from language's assertive nature by "add[ing] to each sentence some little phrase of uncertainty, ~ Maggie Nelson

We don't get to choose what or whom we love, I want to say. We just don't get to choose. ~ Maggie Nelson

He says this episode will be about grief. About helping other people to mourn. He says that my family's involvement could really help other people in similar situations. All those viewers who thought they lost a family member to a famous serial killer, then are told 36 years later that DNA from the crime scene matches both that of a retired nurse and a man who was four years old at the time and grew up to murder his mother, I think.
With less graciousness than I'd hoped to display, I ask if there's a reason why stories about the bizarre, violent deaths of young, good-looking, middle- to upper-class white girls help people mourn better than other stories. ~ Maggie Nelson

Whereas an art that affects you in the moment, but which you then find hard to remember, is straining to bring you to another level. It offers images or ideas from that other level, that other way of being, which is why you find them hard to remember. But it has opened you to the possibility of growing into what you are not yet, which is exactly what art should do. ~ Maggie Nelson

Sometimes one has to know something many times over. Sometimes one forgets, and then remembers. And then forgets, and then remembers. And then forgets again. ~ Maggie Nelson

That's enough. You can stop now: the phrase Sedgwick said she longed to hear whenever she was suffering. (Enough hurting, enough showing off, enough achieving, enough talking, enough trying, enough writing, enough living.) ~ Maggie Nelson

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

Perhaps I had inadvertently brushed up against the Buddhist axiom, that enlightenment is the ultimate disappointment. ~ Maggie Nelson

Exasperated, you finally said, 'You think I'm not worried too? Of course I'm worried. What I don't need is your worry on top of mine. I need your support ~ Maggie Nelson

181. Pharmakon means drug, but as Jacques Derrida and others have pointed out, the word in Greek famously refuses to designate whether poison or cure. It holds both in the bowl. In the dialogues Plato uses the word to refer to everything from an illness, its cause, its cure, a recipe, a charm, a substance, a spell, artificial color, and paint. ~ Maggie Nelson

96. For a prince of blue is a prince of blue because keeps 'a pet sorrow, a blue-devil familiar, that goes with him everywhere' (Lowell, 1870) This is how a prince of blue becomes a pain devil. ~ Maggie Nelson

What if where I am is what I need? ~ Maggie Nelson

95. But please don't write again to tell me how you have woken up weeping. I already know how you are in love with your weeping. ~ Maggie Nelson

None seemed irreverent enough to address the situation of being a baby, of caretaking a baby. Do castration and the Phallus tell us the deep Truths of Western culture or just the truth of how things are and might not always be? It astonishes and shames me to think that I spent years finding such questions not only comprehensible, but compelling. ~ Maggie Nelson

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. ~ Maggie Nelson

And if 'saturation' means that one simply could not absorb or contain one single drop more, why does 'saturation' not bring with it a connotation of satisfaction, either in concept, or in experience? ~ Maggie Nelson

I have been trying to place myself in a land of great sunshine, and abandon my will therewith. ~ Maggie Nelson

It will not say, 'Isn't X beautiful?' Such demands are murderous to beauty. ~ Maggie Nelson

I labor grimly on these sentences, wondering all the while if prose is but the gravestone marking the forsaking of wildness ~ Maggie Nelson

The point wasn't that if the outer world were schooled appropriately re: the characters' preferred pronouns, everything would be right as rain. Because if the outsiders called the characters "he", it would be a different kind of he. Words change depending on who speaks them; there is no cure. ~ Maggie Nelson

A man who thinks he is a king is mad, a king who thinks he is a king is no less so. ~ Maggie Nelson

I can remember a time when I took Henry James's advice
'try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!'
deeply to heart. I think I was then imagining that the net effect of becoming one of those people would be one of accretion. Whereas if you truly become someone on whom nothing is lost, then loss will not be lost upon you, either. ~ Maggie Nelson

And certainly there are many speakers whom I'd like to see do more trembling, more unknowing, more apologizing. ~ Maggie Nelson

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. (Can a reflection be a witness? Can one pass oneself the sponge wet with vinegar from a reed?) ~ Maggie Nelson

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. ~ Maggie Nelson

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. ~ Maggie Nelson

We struggled to understand how a contract with the so-called secular state could mandate some kind of spiritual ritual. ~ Maggie Nelson

But really justice has no coordinates, no teleology. ~ Maggie Nelson

and I am missing you in the way
that spreads. I'm trying

to wear my freedom like
an amulet, make it something

I'll never forget. ~ Maggie Nelson

There is nothing you can throw at me that I cannot metabolize, no thing impervious to my alchemy. ~ Maggie Nelson

44. [...] later that afternoon, a therapist will say to me, "If he hadn't lied to you, he would have been a different person than he is." She is trying to get me to see that although I thought I loved this man very completely for exactly who he was, I was in fact blind to the man he actually was, or is.
45. This pains me enormously. She presses me to say why; I can't answer. Instead I say something about how clinical psychology forces everything we call love into the pathological or the delusional or the biologically explicable, that if what I was feeling wasn't love then I am forced to admit that I don't know what love is, or, more simply, that I loved a bad man. How all of these formulations drain the blue right out of love and leave an ugly, pigmentless fish flapping on a cutting board on a kitchen counter. ~ Maggie Nelson

Empirically speaking, we are made from star stuff. Why aren't we talking more about that? Materials never leave this world. They just keep recycling, recombining. That's what you kept telling me when we met
that in a real, material sense, what is made from where. I didn't have a clue what you were talking about, but I could see you burned for it. I wanted to be near that burning. I still don't understand, but at least now my fingers ride the lip. ~ Maggie Nelson

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

Perhaps it's the word radical that needs rethinking. But what could we angle ourselves toward instead, or in addition? Openness? Is that good enough, strong enough? You're the only one who knows when you're using things to protect yourself and keep your ego together and when you're opening and letting things fall apart, letting the world come as it is - working with it rather than struggling against it. You're the only one who knows. And the thing is, even you don't always know. ~ Maggie Nelson

Perhaps it is becoming clearer why I felt no romance when you told me that you carried my last letter with you, everywhere you went, for months on end, unopened. This may have served some purpose for you, but whatever it was, surely it bore little resemblance to mine. I never aimed to give you a talisman, an empty vessel to flood with whatever longing, dread, or sorrow happened to be the day's mood. I wrote it because I had something to say to you. ~ Maggie Nelson

The problem is, of course, that art typically requires an audience, which loops us right back to the problem of observing actions and losing ourselves in consideration of their imagined form. ~ Maggie Nelson