Bluets
Metadata
- Author: Maggie Nelson
- ASIN: B007NYTSA4
- ISBN: 1933517409
- Reference: https://amazon.co.uk/dp/B007NYTSA4
- Kindle link
Highlights
spoke. It began slowly. An appreciation, an affinity. Then, one day, it became more serious. Then (looking into an empty teacup, its bottom stained with thin brown excrement coiled into the shape of a sea horse) it became somehow personal. 2. And so I fell in love with — location: 31
Eventually Mallarmé began replacing “le ciel” with “l’Azur” in his poems, in an effort to rinse references — location: 45
Michon in wintder mythologjes sskociates this with an early attempt of paganism to understand god - the conversion of an empty pgan space to one swith meaning
— location: 46
Michon in wintder mythologjes sskociates this with an early attempt of paganism to understand god - the conversion of an empty pgan space to one swith meaning
flipping on the light in a stranger’s bathroom one presumed to be white but which was, in fact, robin-egg blue; coming across a collection — location: 130
“He found the world drab, and was upset by flaking paint and other blemishes; he liked bright colours, but became depressed when they faded.” Not long after he gained — location: 135
If he hadn’t lied to you, he would have been a different person than he is. She is trying to get me to see that although I thought I loved this man very completely for exactly who he was, I was in fact blind to the man he actually was, or is. 45. This pains me enormously. She presses me to say why; I can’t answer. Instead I say something about how clinical psychology forces everything we call love into the pathological or the delusional or the biologically explicable, that if what I was feeling wasn’t love then I am forced to admit that I don’t know what love is, or, more simply, that I loved a bad man. How all of these formulations drain the blue right out of love and leave an ugly, pigmentless fish flapping on a cutting board on a kitchen counter. 46. Disavowal, says the silence. — location: 172
“We mainly suppose the experiential quality to be an intrinsic quality of the physical object”—this is the so-called systematic illusion of color. Perhaps it is also that of love. But I am not willing to go there—not just yet. I believed in you. 54. Long before either wave — location: 200
- One image of the intellectual: a man who loses his eyesight not out of shame (Oedipus) but in order to think more clearly (Milton). I try to avoid generalities when it comes to the business of gender, but in all honesty I must admit that I simply cannot conceive of a version of female intelligence that would advocate such a thing. An “abortion of the mind, this purity” (W. C. Williams). 56. There are, however, many — location: 207
Loneliness is solitude with a problem. Can blue solve the problem, — location: 264
chicken—a young doctor inside asked me to rate my pain on a scale of 1 to 10—I was flummoxed, I felt as though I shouldn’t be there at all—I said “6”—he said to the nurse, Write down “8,” since women always underestimate their pain. Men always say “11,” he said. I didn’t believe him, but I supposed he might know. 87. “suffering, joy, exertion, — location: 312
That’s my depression talking. It’s not “me.” 89. As if we could scrape the color off the iris and still see. 90. Last night I wept in a way I — location: 319
“The sadness will last forever.” I imagine he was right. 99. After a few months in the hospital, — location: 340
Pialat
— location: 341
Pialat
“There is simply no way that a year from now you’re going to feel the way you feel today,” a different therapist said to me last year at this time. But though I have learned to act as if I feel differently, the truth is that my feelings haven’t really changed. 101. “The years of the second war, — location: 345
After reading this I polled several friends to see how much time they would grant between “a blinding, bad time” and a life that has simply become a depressive waste; the consensus was around seven years. This bespeaks the generosity of — location: 348
Lol
— location: 350
Lol
Note that here, as elsewhere, seeing clearly seems to take Werther, and us, no further. 121. “Clearness is so eminently — location: 437
We cannot read the darkness. We cannot read it. It is a form of madness, albeit a common one, that we try. 131. “I just don’t feel like you’re — location: 469
So, I think, did Wittgenstein. “Explanations come to an end somewhere,” he wrote. 162. According to Dionysius, the — location: 580