The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Reads tagged with “letters”

Van Gogh on Heartbreak and Unrequited Love as a Vitalizing Force for Creative Work
Van Gogh on Heartbreak and Unrequited Love as a Vitalizing Force for Creative Work

“Nothing awakens us to the reality of life so much as a true love.”

read article

John Steinbeck on Racism and Bigotry
John Steinbeck on Racism and Bigotry

“I am sad for a time when one must know a man’s race before his work can be approved or disapproved.”

read article

Dostoyevsky on the Heart vs. the Mind and How We Come to Know Truth
Dostoyevsky on the Heart vs. the Mind and How We Come to Know Truth

“Nature, the soul, love, and God, one recognizes through the heart, and not through the reason… Reason is a tool, a machine, which is driven by the spiritual fire.”

read article

Patti Smith Reads Her Beautiful Letter to Robert Mapplethorpe About How He Taught Her What It Means to Be an Artist
Patti Smith Reads Her Beautiful Letter to Robert Mapplethorpe About How He Taught Her What It Means to Be an Artist

“You drew me from the darkest period of my young life, sharing with me the sacred mystery of what it is to be an artist.”

read article

Great Writers on the Power of Music
Great Writers on the Power of Music

Kurt Vonnegut, Susan Sontag, Aldous Huxley, Oliver Sacks, Walt Whitman, Virginia Woolf, Friedrich Nietzsche, and more.

read article

Don’t Heed the Haters: Albert Einstein’s Wonderful Letter of Support to Marie Curie in the Midst of Scandal
Don’t Heed the Haters: Albert Einstein’s Wonderful Letter of Support to Marie Curie in the Midst of Scandal

“If the rabble continues to occupy itself with you, then simply don’t read that hogwash, but rather leave it to the reptile for whom it has been fabricated.”

read article

John Steinbeck on Writing, the Crucible of Creativity, and the Mobilizing Power of the Impossible
John Steinbeck on Writing, the Crucible of Creativity, and the Mobilizing Power of the Impossible

“A good writer always works at the impossible.”

read article

Rilke’s Redemption: The Beloved Poet’s Stirring Letter to His Boyhood Teacher at the Military Academy That Almost Broke His Soul
Rilke’s Redemption: The Beloved Poet’s Stirring Letter to His Boyhood Teacher at the Military Academy That Almost Broke His Soul

“Life is very singularly made to surprise us (where it does not utterly appall us).”

read article

Steinbeck and the Difficult Art of the Friend Breakup
Steinbeck and the Difficult Art of the Friend Breakup

“I can’t consider you a friend when out of every contact there comes some intentionally wounding thing.”

read article

The Angels and Demons of Genius: Robert Lowell on What It’s Like to Be Bipolar
The Angels and Demons of Genius: Robert Lowell on What It’s Like to Be Bipolar

“My disease, alas, gives one (during its seizures) a headless heart.”

read article

View Full Site

The Marginalian participates in the Bookshop.org and Amazon.com affiliate programs, designed to provide a means for sites to earn commissions by linking to books. In more human terms, this means that whenever you buy a book from a link here, I receive a small percentage of its price, which goes straight back into my own colossal biblioexpenses. Privacy policy. (TLDR: You're safe — there are no nefarious "third parties" lurking on my watch or shedding crumbs of the "cookies" the rest of the internet uses.)