The Art of Cruelty Quotes

“the mainstream thrust of anti-intellectualism, as it stands today, characterizes thinking itself as an elitist activity.”
― Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning

“psychoanalysis gets interesting when it shifts the focus from making us more intelligible to ourselves to helping us become more curious about how strange we really are. And so, I would argue, does art.”
― Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning

“Misogyny, when expressed or explored by men, remains a timeless classic.”
― Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning

“Girls are cruelest to themselves,” observes Anne Carson in “The Glass Essay,” her brilliant long poem about the ravages of female anger, loneliness, grief, and desire, giving us as poetic adage what any number of other fields give us as statistic.”
― Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning

“Writing hasn’t changed a thing; when the writer puts down the pen, no matter how lucid or brutally honest his insights may have been, it is back to business as usual, which means, in this case, shooting up. This is depressing, but its honesty heartens me. It disallows the delusion that the act of writing necessarily connects us to humanity, that it will help us quit noxious substances, that it will restore us to love lost, or at least serve as a consolation. Literature is not, after all, self-help.”
― Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning

“So long as we exalt artists as beautiful liars or as the world’s most profound truth-tellers, we remain locked in a moralistic paradigm that doesn’t even begin to engage art’s most exciting provinces (139).”
― Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning

“It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we have made that we exist,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson.”
― Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning

“We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate on them well,” wrote Emerson. Is it true? If so, who can bear to believe it?”
― Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning

“While the two words often arrive sutured together, I think it worthwhile to breathe some space between them, so that one might see “brutal honesty” not as a more forceful version of honesty itself, but as one possible use of honesty. One that doesn’t necessarily lay truth barer by dint of force, but that actually overlays something on top of it—something that can get in its way. That something is cruelty.”
― Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning

“both offer immersion in their vision without rehashing the avant-garde fetish of terrorizing the audience or the mainstream one of chaperoning it. “We abide by cultural directives that urge us: clarify each thought, each experience, so you can cull from them their single, dominant meaning and, in the process, become a responsible adult who knows what he or she thinks,” Foreman has said. “But what I try to show is the opposite: how at every moment, the world presents us with a composition in which a multitude of meanings and realities are available, and you are able to swim, lucid and self-contained, in that turbulent sea of multiplicity.”
― Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning

“For the mainstream thrust of anti-intellectualism, as it stands today, characterizes thinking itself as an elitist activity.”
― Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning

“attempts to nail down “who we really are” most often serve as rhetorical pawns in unwinnable arguments fueled by competing agendas”
― Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning

“Katharsis arrives in English virtually untranslated, as “catharsis,” which derives from katharos—“pure.” But the word has stretched to signify or entail a wide variety of processes, including clarification, enlightenment, purgation, elimination, transubstantiation, sublimation, release, satisfaction, homeopathic cure, or some combination thereof. Second, the phrasing of Aristotle’s original sentence leaves it unclear whether “catharsis” applies to incidents or to emotions—that is, whether the action takes place inside an individual, outside of her, or somewhere in between.”
― Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning

“So long as we exalt artists as beautiful liars or as the world’s most profound truth-tellers, we remain locked in a moralistic paradigm that doesn’t even begin to engage art’s most exciting provinces.”
― Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning

“Whereas an art that affects you in the moment, but which you then find hard to remember, is straining to bring you to another level. It offers images or ideas from that other level, that other way of being, which is why you find them hard to remember. But it has opened you to the possibility of growing into what you are not yet, which is exactly what art should do.”
― Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning

“But “knowing the truth” does not come with redemption as a guarantee, nor does a feeling of redemption guarantee an end to a cycle of wrongdoing. Some would even say it is key to maintaining it, insofar as it can work as a reset button—a purge that cleans the slate, without any guarantee of change at the root. Placing all one’s eggs in “the logic of exposure,” as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has put it (in Touching Feeling), may also simply further the logic of paranoia. “Paranoia places its faith in exposure,” Sedgwick observes—which is to say that the exposure of a disturbing fact or situation does not necessarily alter it, but in fact may further the circular conviction that one can never be paranoid enough.”
― Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning

“The problem is, of course, that art typically requires an audience, which loops us right back to the problem of observing actions and losing ourselves in consideration of their imagined form.”
― Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning

“Not only do our work and words speak beyond our intentions and controls, but compassion is not necessarily found where we presume it to be, nor is it always what we presume it to be, nor is it experienced or accessed by everyone in the same way, nor is it found in the same place in the same way over time. The same might be said about cruelty.”
― Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning