Maggie Nelson

"Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color."

Bluets

Mal 

6) The half-circle of blinding turquoise ocean is this love's primal scene. That this blue exists makes my life a remarkable one, just to have seen it. To have seen such beautiful things. To find oneself placed in their midst. Choiceless. I returned there yesterday and stood again upon the mountain.

Patricia K

taylor miles hopkins

27. But why bother with diagnoses at all, if a diagnosis is but a restatement of the problem?

You might want to reach out and disturb the pile of pigment, for example, first staining your fingers with it, then staining the world. You might want to dilute it and swim in it…But still you wouldn't be accessing the blue of it. Not exactly.

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?)

71. I have been trying, for some time now, to find dignity in my loneliness. I have been finding this hard to do.

81. What I know: when I met you, a blue rush began. I want you to know, I no longer hold you responsible.

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.

lily lily 

In the years since, I have sometimes found myself wondering if the same principle applies in other realms—if seeing a particularly astonishing shade of blue, for example, or letting a particularly potent person inside you, could alter you irrevocably, just to have seen or felt it. In which case, how does one know when, or how, to refuse?

When I say “hope,” I don’t mean hope for anything in particular. I guess I just mean thinking that it’s worth it to keep one’s eyes open.

Bluets quotes

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