The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Reads tagged with “letters”

The Binary Code of Body and Spirit: Computing Pioneer Alan Turing on Mortality
The Binary Code of Body and Spirit: Computing Pioneer Alan Turing on Mortality

“The body provides something for the spirit to look after and use.”

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Rachel Carson’s Brave and Prescient 1953 Letter Against the Government’s Assault on Science and Nature
Rachel Carson’s Brave and Prescient 1953 Letter Against the Government’s Assault on Science and Nature

“The real wealth of the Nation lies in the resources of the earth — soil, water, forests, minerals, and wildlife… Their administration is not properly, and cannot be, a matter of politics.”

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May Sarton on the Artist’s Duty to Contact the Timeless in Tumultuous Times
May Sarton on the Artist’s Duty to Contact the Timeless in Tumultuous Times

“Now it has become impossible to guard one’s soul… We are forced to read the papers, and yet… our job is somehow or other to be above the mêlée, or so deeply in it that one comes through to something else, something universal and timeless.”

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A Partnership Larger Than Marriage: The Stunning Love Letters of Kahlil Gibran and Mary Haskell
A Partnership Larger Than Marriage: The Stunning Love Letters of Kahlil Gibran and Mary Haskell

“You are like the Great Spirit, who befriends man not only to share his life, but to add to it. My knowing you is the greatest thing in my days and nights, a miracle quite outside the natural order of things.”

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The Monarchs, Music, and the Meaning of Life: The Most Touching Deathbed Love Letter Ever Written
The Monarchs, Music, and the Meaning of Life: The Most Touching Deathbed Love Letter Ever Written

From butterflies to Beethoven, an ode to the heart’s uncontainable dimensions.

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Italo Calvino on Racial Justice: The Beloved Italian Writer’s Stirring Account of the Early Civil Rights Movement and His Encounter with Martin Luther King, Jr.
Italo Calvino on Racial Justice: The Beloved Italian Writer’s Stirring Account of the Early Civil Rights Movement and His Encounter with Martin Luther King, Jr.

“What counts is what we are, and the way we deepen our relationship with the world and with others, a relationship that can be one of both love for all that exists and of desire for its transformation.”

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The Joy of Suffering Overcome: Young Beethoven’s Stirring Letter to His Brothers About the Loneliness of Living with Deafness and How Music Saved His Life
The Joy of Suffering Overcome: Young Beethoven’s Stirring Letter to His Brothers About the Loneliness of Living with Deafness and How Music Saved His Life

“Ah! how could I possibly quit the world before bringing forth all that I felt it was my vocation to produce?”

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Poet, Painter, and Philosopher Kahlil Gibran on Creativity
Poet, Painter, and Philosopher Kahlil Gibran on Creativity

“There is no deeper desire than the desire of being revealed. We all want that little light in us to be taken from under the bushel.”

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Philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft on the Imagination and Its Seductive Power in Human Relationships
Philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft on the Imagination and Its Seductive Power in Human Relationships

“These emotions … appear to me to be the distinctive characteristic of genius, the foundation of taste, and of that exquisite relish for the beauties of nature, of which the common herd of eaters and drinkers and child-begeters, certainly have no idea.”

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John Steinbeck on Good and Evil, the Necessary Contradictions of the Human Nature, and Our Grounds for Lucid Hope
John Steinbeck on Good and Evil, the Necessary Contradictions of the Human Nature, and Our Grounds for Lucid Hope

“All the goodness and the heroisms will rise up again, then be cut down again and rise up. It isn’t that the evil thing wins — it never will — but that it doesn’t die.”

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