Emily MacDonald

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.”
― Heraclitus

“One of the men asks, Why blue? People ask me this question often. I never know how to respond. 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

“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, Bluets

“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, Bluets