“Few real people appear in my two novels, actually. “Ari” appears on the edge of this book a couple of times – but on the edge, she’s never in it, even if she’s a determining force from the outside. Everybody in the first book was basically made up, if never from scratch.”

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.

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.

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.

We should all visit the sick. When they are in sorrow and suffering, it is a real help and benefit to have a friend come.

When the bubble of ignorance bursts the self realizes its oneness with the indivisible Self. Words that proceed from the Source of Truth have real meaning. But when men speakthese words as their own, the words become meaningless.

Irrespective of doubts and convictions, and for the Infinite Love I bear for one and all, I continue to come as the Avatar, to be judged time and again by humanity in its ignorance, in order to help man distinguish the Real from the false.

What I want from my lovers is real, unadulterated love, and from my genuine workers I expect real work done.

God has been everlastingly working in Silence, unobserved, unheard, except by those who experience His Infinite Silence. Those who have got the courage and wisdom to surrender themselves to a Perfect Master are the recipients of His Grace.

According to the law that governs the universe,all sufferings are your labor of love to unveil your real self.

A patriot without religion in my estimation is as great a paradox as an honest Man without the fear of God.

I don’t think life offers any greater experience than the joyful sense of recognition when one finds in a new acquaintance a real friend