Like Love Quotes

“I learned that finding out what you think or feel about something can take time, and that that time is always worth taking. I learned that art is one way we live together in this world, even as it relates and separates us, like Hannah Arendt’s famous table.”
― Maggie Nelson, Like Love: Essays and Conversations

“the act of bestowing attention serves as its own reward. And how such engagement attaches and reattaches me to curiosity, to others, to life, especially when my own spirits have dimmed.”
― Maggie Nelson, Like Love: Essays and Conversations

“Language is forced on art,” says Rachel Harrison. “Is that really best for art? Is that really good for art? Does that make art happy?” Probably not. Probably, language does not make art happy. Language doesn’t always make me happy. But sometimes, you must explain. And not just because someone asked, or because we live in a culture of explanation, but because one wants to. Needs to. The language rises up, an upchuck. Words aren’t just what’s left; they’re what we have to offer.”
― Maggie Nelson, Like Love: Essays and Conversations

“I learned something about the craving for connection that art conjures, frustrates, and possibly exists to satisfy. I learned that finding out what you think or feel about something can take time, and that that time is always worth taking. I learned that art is one way we live together in this world, even as it relates and separates us, like Hannah Arendt’s famous table.”
― Maggie Nelson, Like Love: Essays and Conversations

“The pulsations of cathexis around shame … are what either enable or disenable so basic a function as the ability to be interested in the world…. Without positive affect, there can be no shame: only a scene that offers you enjoyment or engages your interest can make you blush.”
― Maggie Nelson, Like Love: Essays and Conversations

“This seems as good a moment as any to mention that Sedgwick was once my teacher, back when I was a doctoral student at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. During this time, I felt very acutely the distance I had yet to travel to become a person who could appreciate such gaps between knowing and realizing. As often happens with a figure whom many treat as a guru, or with someone you perceive as “having what you want,” the idolization/ idealization produced a kind of melancholia: the melancholia of inferiority, of distance, of longing, of feared impossibility, of shame about where you are, or who you are, right now. The desire to move quickly into enlightenment, liberation, knowledge, sobriety, shamelessness—into a freer self, a happier self, a queerer self, or what have you—can be fierce, and fiercely privatizing.”
― Maggie Nelson, Like Love: Essays and Conversations

“Sedgwick never denied the difficulty of such a process—especially for intellectuals, who often pride themselves on their own quicksilver capacity to absorb knowledge (which may have nothing to do with their capacity for realization). That’s why she says “It’s hard.” It is hard, often quite. But Sedgwick’s native capacity for tenacity and jubilance in the face of difficulty, as well as her sustained engagement with Buddhism, allowed her to cast this difficulty as a privilege. “In Buddhist pedagogical thought,” she writes in Touching Feeling, “the apparent tautology of learning what you already know does not seem to constitute a paradox, nor an impasse, nor a scandal. It is not even a problem. If anything, it is a deliberate and defining practice.” Sedgwick wrote often about pedagogy in her final years—not so much about specific classroom instances per se, but about pedagogy as a site of relation, a sort of laboratory, in which a list of things to know might shift into a manifestation of ways of knowing, not to mention doing or being.”
― Maggie Nelson, Like Love: Essays and Conversations

“In a 1999 interview, Sedgwick put it this way: “It’s hard to recognize that your whole being, your soul doesn’t move at the speed of your cognition. That it could take you a year to really know something that you intellectually believe in a second.” Sedgwick explains that she eventually learned “how not to feel ashamed of the amount of time things take, or the recalcitrance of emotional or personal change.” Indeed, as she puts it in “Reality and Realization”: “Perhaps the most change can happen when that contempt changes to respect, a respect for the very ordinariness of the opacities between knowing and realizing.”
― Maggie Nelson, Like Love: Essays and Conversations

“As she explains in Touching Feeling, she wanted to move past the rather fixated questions “Is a particular piece of knowledge true, and how can we know?” to the question “What does knowledge do—the pursuit of it, the having and exposing of it, the receiving again of knowledge of what one already knows?” It will likely not come as news to any of us that we can be quick to apprehend something intellectually, but that realizing it—whatever that might mean—is often a much more involved, perhaps limitless affair.”
― Maggie Nelson, Like Love: Essays and Conversations

“how the act of bestowing attention serves as its own reward. And how such engagement attaches and reattaches me to curiosity, to others, to life, especially when my own spirits have dimmed.”
― Maggie Nelson, Like Love: Essays and Conversations