Joelessa Manlod > Joelessa's Quotes

“156. Why is the sky blue? -A fair enough question, and one I have learned the answer to several times. Yet every time I try to explain it to someone or remember it to myself, it eludes me. Now I like to remember the question alone, as it reminds me that my mind is essentially a sieve, that I am mortal.

157. The part I do remember: that the blue of the sky depends on the darkness of empty space behind it. As one optics journal puts it, "The color of any planetary atmosphere viewed against the black of space and illuminated by a sunlike star will also be blue." In which case blue is something of an ecstatic accident produced by void and fire.”
― Maggie Nelson, Bluets

“Life is a train of moods like a string of beads and as we pass through them they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in it's focus. To find oneself trapped in any one bead, no matter what it's hue, can be deadly.”
― Maggie Nelson, Bluets

“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, Bluets

“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.”
― Maggie Nelson, Bluets

“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, Bluets

“229. I am writing all this down in blue ink, so as to remember that all words, not just some, are written in water.”
― Maggie Nelson, Bluets

“What I know: when I met you, a blue rush began. I want you to know, I no longer hold you responsible.”
― Maggie Nelson, Bluets

“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, Bluets

“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, Bluets

“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, Bluets

“Fifteen days after we are born, we begin to discriminate between colors. For the rest of our lives, barring blunted or blinded sight, we find ourselves face-to-face with all these phenomena at once, and we call the whole shimmering mess “color.” You might even say that it is the business of the eye to make colored forms out of what is essentially shimmering. This is how we “get around” in the world. Some might also call it the source of our suffering.”
― Maggie Nelson, Bluets

“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 my 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, Bluets

“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. 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, Bluets

“We don’t get to choose what or whom we love, I want to say. We just don’t get to choose.”
― Maggie Nelson, Bluets

“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.”
― Maggie Nelson, Bluets

“I have been trying, for some time now, to find dignity in my loneliness. I have been finding this hard to do.”
― Maggie Nelson, Bluets

“When I was alive, I aimed to be a student not of longing but of light.”
― Maggie Nelson, Bluets

“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, Bluets

“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 my 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, Bluets

“I am trying to talk about what blue means, or what it means to me, apart from meaning.”
― Maggie Nelson, Bluets

“Empirically speaking, we are made of star stuff. Why aren’t we talking more about that?”
― Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts

“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, The Argonauts