The Argonauts

by Maggie Nelson

Once we name something, you said, we can never see it the same way again. All that is unnameable falls away, gets lost, is murdered.

age doesn’t necessarily bring anything with it, save itself. The rest is optional.

One of the most annoying things about hearing the refrain “same-sex marriage” over and over again is that I don’t know many—if any—queers who think of their desire’s main feature as being “same-sex.”

How to explain—“trans” may work well enough as shorthand, but the quickly developing mainstream narrative it evokes (“born in the wrong body,” necessitating an orthopedic pilgrimage between two fixed destinations) is useless for some—but partially, or even profoundly, useful for others?

People are different from each other. Unfortunately, the dynamic of becoming a spokesperson almost always threatens to bury this fact.

relation can never be achieved in a simple fashion through writing, if it can be achieved at all.

My writing is riddled with such tics of uncertainty. I have no excuse or solution, save to allow myself the tremblings, then go back in later and slash them out. In this way I edit myself into a boldness that is neither native nor foreign to me.

You’re a great student because you don’t have any baggage, a teacher once told me, at which moment the subterfuge of my life felt complete.

The pleasures of ordinary devotion. The pleasure of recognizing that one may have to undergo the same realizations, write the same notes in the margin, return to the same themes in one’s work, relearn the same emotional truths, write the same book over and over again—not because one is stupid or obstinate or incapable of change, but because such revisitations constitute a life.

All of her passwords and e-mail addresses were variants on Paris, a city she would never see.