“The problem is that if you’re self-conscious about being a person on whom nothing is lost, isn’t something lost – some kind of presence? You’re distracted by trying to be totally, perfectly impressionable.”

I was a violent, bipolar, compulsive liar. I was a real American.

I’ll work my way from irony to sincerity in the sinking city, a would-be Whitman of the vulnerable grid.

I don’t think it’s always a sign of respect for persons (inside or outside of fiction) to pretend to be able to represent, to have access to, their multi-dimensionality at every moment. That doesn’t imply people aren’t multi-dimensional.

Every relationship can feel saturated by market logic or at best purchased at the price of the immiseration of others.

Maggie Nelson cuts through our culture’s prefabricated structures of thought and feeling with an intelligence whose ferocity is ultimately in the service of love. No piety is safe, no orthodoxy, no easy irony. The scare quotes burn off like fog.

Are there are fireflies on the West Coast? I never saw any when I lived in California.

Experiments with the “as if” of fiction are often more lively in poetry and criticism and other modes of writing than in weak short stories or novels.

I didn’t want to write another book about fraudulence.

When the narrator feels like an octopus, when he says his limbs are starting to multiply, he means he has inklings of orders of perception beyond his individual body.

I remember I had this recurring dream that we were playing a night game and instead of eye black we had mashed up the glowing bodies of fireflies and put that under our eyes. So our faces were glowing – a kind of night vision.

What interests me about fiction is, in part, its flickering edge between realism and where a tear in the fabric of a story lets in some other sort of light.

I have no interest in artists who are purely affirmative, who’ve made a commercialized fetish of the culture’s stupidity.

I’m trying to be somebody on whom the experience is lost by supplanting it with its telling. I definitely do that in medical contexts, even in trivial ones.

I think the parable is a peculiar way of saying that redemption is immanent whether or not it’s imminent, that the world to come is in a sense always already here, if still unavailable. I find this idea powerful for several reasons. For one thing, it’s an antidote to despair.

Henry James claim that if you want to be a novelist you should be somebody on whom nothing is lost.

Many of the left thinkers that really matter to me – that formed a big part of my thinking about politics and art – emphasize how capitalism is a totality, how there’s no escape from it, no outside.

A self needed to spill out sometimes, a body should show evidence of what the hell went on inside it.

Our peasant music, naturally, is invariably tonal, if not always in the sense that the inflexible major and minor system is tonal. (An “atonal” folk-music, in my opinion, is unthinkable.)

I see the meaning of apocalypse as an unveiling of our deeper self.

I think if you spend much time dwelling on influence you can get self-conscious about every line you write. That’s a great way to freeze up.

Our too-young and too-new America, lusty because it is lonely, aggressive because it is afraid, insists upon seeing the world in terms of good and bad.

False self is an identity based on what you have, what you do, and what others think about you. In stark contrast to this is the true self in Christ, which is who we are before God and in God – Christ living in us, as Paul put it to the churches in Galatia.

The beauty of a lake reflects the beauty around it. When the mind is still, the beauty of the Self is seen reflected in it.

A direct statement about yourself is considered objective only if it is negative. If it’s positive, it is considered subjective. And ‘objective’ means it is accurate, and ‘subjective’ means it is conceited self-delusion.