“Love is a fog that burns with the first daylight of reality.”

The free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it – basically because you feel good, very good, when you are near or with them.

My beer drunk soul is sadder than all the dead christmas trees of the world.

That’s the problem with drinking, I thought, as I poured myself a drink. If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen.

I guess the only time most people think about injustice is when it happens to them.

I lie as truthfully as I can.

People run from rain but sit in bathtubs full of water.

Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.

I still have a little whiskey left and therefore a chance.

Wherever the crowd goes run in the other direction. They’re always wrong.

The shortest distance between two points is often unbearable.

The world is full of boring, identical and mindless people.

I am a series of small victories and large defeats and I am as amazed as any other that I have gotten from there to here.

Dogs and angels are not very far apart.

She’s mad, but she’s magic. There’s no lie in her fire.

Almost everybody is born a genius and buried an idiot.

Find what you love and let it kill you. Let it drain from you your all. Let it cling onto your back and weigh you down into eventual nothingness. Let it kill you, and let it devour your remains.

It is easier to rob by setting up a bank than by holding up a bank clerk.

Politicians are like ships: noisiest when lost in a fog.

Sleepwalking down the hall like a firefly in the fog.

Composing is like driving down a foggy road.

The scare quotes burn off like fog.

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.

I see a lot of fog and a few lights. I like it when life’s hidden. It gives you a chance to imagine nice things, nicer than they are.

It is as useless to fight against the interpretations of ignorance as to whip the fog.