Needed this. Was feeling blue. Just went through a breakup and although my heart wasn't broken, I was reminded of what that felt like, that violent longing to never have to wake up in a world where he wasn't mine anymore, the childish bargain that ran through my mind, that I would trade in anything they asked for if they would give us more time together. Nelson meditates on the way memories take on a tinge of blue when you know how that the story ends. I read the book in snatches on the subway and bit my lip to keep from crying. 
 tl;dr: Dear lovers of the little-bit-blue variety: Maggie Nelson's got the pharmakon for what ails ya. #onesentencereviews 
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 "8. Do not, however, make the mistake of thinking that all desire is yearning. 'We love to contemplate blue, not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it,' wrote Goethe, and perhaps he is right. But I am not interested in longing to live in a world in which I already live. I don't want to yearn for blue things, and God forbid for any 'blueness.' Above all, I want to stop missing you." (4) 
 "94. -Well then, it is as you please. This is the dysfunction talking. This is the disease talking. This is how much I miss you talking. This is the deepest blue, talking, talking, always talking to you." (35) 
 "This is generous, for to be close to her pain has always felt like a privilege to me..." (39) 
 "183. Goethe also worries over the destructive effects of writing. In particular, he worries over how to 'keep the essential quality [of the thing] still living before us, and not kill it with the word.' I must admit, I no longer worry much about such things. For better or worse, I do not think that writing changes things very much, if at all. For the most part, I think it leaves everything as it was. What does your poetry do? - I guess it gives a kind of blue rinse to the language (John Ashberry)." (74) 
 191. On the other hand, it must be admitted that there are aftereffects, impressions that linger long after the external cause has been removed, or has removed itself. 'If anyone looks at the sun, he may retain the image in his eyes for several days,' Goethe wrote. 'Boyle relates an image of ten years.' And who is to say this afterimage is not equally real? Indigo makes its stain not in the dyeing vat, but after the garment has been removed. It is the oxygen of the air that blues it." (76) 
 "199. For to wish to forget how much you loved someone - and then, to actually forget - can feel, at times, like the slaughter of a beautiful bird who chose, by nothing short of grace, to make a habitat of your heart. I have heard that this pain can be converted, as it were, by accepting 'the fundamental impermanence of all things.' This acceptance bewilders me: sometimes it seems an act of will; at others, of surrender. Often I feel myself to be rocking between them (seasickness)." (79-80) 
 "238. I want you to know, if you ever read this, there was a time when I would rather have had you by my side than any one of these words; I would rather have had you by my side than all the blue in the world. 
 239. But now you are talking as if love were a consolation. Simone Weil warned otherwise. 'Love is not consolation,' she wrote. 'It is light.' 
 240. All right then, let me try to rephrase. When I was alive, I aimed to be a student not of longing but of light." (95)