Wednesday 7 December 2016

Maggie Nelson, "The Argonauts"

Here are two quotes which I have come to love from Maggie Nelson's book "The Argonauts".

"You, reader, are alive today, reading this, because someone once adequately policed your mouth-exploring. In the face of this fact, Winnicott holds the relatively unsentimental position that we don't owe these people (often women, but by no means always) anything. But we do owe ourselves 'an intellectual recognition of the fact that at first we were (psychologically) absolutely dependent, and that absolutely means absolutely. Luckily we were met by early devotion."

"We bantered good-naturedly, yet somehow allowed ourselves to get polarized into a needless binary. That's what we both hate about fiction, or at least crappy fiction - it purports to provide occasions for thinking through complex issues, but really it has predetermined the positions, stuffed a narrative full of false choices, and hooked you on them, rendering you less able to see out, to get out."


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