The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Reads from 2015

Willa Cather on Productivity vs. Creativity and the Life-Changing Advice That Made Her a Writer
Willa Cather on Productivity vs. Creativity and the Life-Changing Advice That Made Her a Writer

“It’s so foolish to live (which is always trouble enough) and not to save your soul. It’s so foolish to lose your real pleasures for the supposed pleasures of the chase — or the stock exchange.”

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Rilke on the Rewards of Reading and What Books Do for Our Inner Lives
Rilke on the Rewards of Reading and What Books Do for Our Inner Lives

“Live a while in these books, learn from them what seems to you worth learning, but above all love them. This love will be repaid you a thousand and a thousand times.”

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Creative Magic and What Makes a Great Writer: Joseph Conrad’s Beautiful Tribute to Henry James
Creative Magic and What Makes a Great Writer: Joseph Conrad’s Beautiful Tribute to Henry James

“All creative art is magic, is evocation of the unseen in forms persuasive, enlightening, familiar and surprising, for the edification of mankind.”

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Thomas Wolfe on Ambition, Gratitude, and the True Measure of Success, in Letters to His Mother
Thomas Wolfe on Ambition, Gratitude, and the True Measure of Success, in Letters to His Mother

“It is not all bad, but it is not all good, it is not all ugly, but it is not all beautiful, it is life, life, life — the only thing that matters.”

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Love of Life: Albert Camus on Happiness, Despair, the Art of Awareness, and Why We Travel
Love of Life: Albert Camus on Happiness, Despair, the Art of Awareness, and Why We Travel

“There is no love of life without despair of life.”

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Alexander von Humboldt and the Invention of Nature: How One of the Last True Polymaths Pioneered the Cosmos of Connections
Alexander von Humboldt and the Invention of Nature: How One of the Last True Polymaths Pioneered the Cosmos of Connections

“In this great chain of causes and effects, no single fact can be considered in isolation.”

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Susan Orlean on the Strange Serendipities That Shape Our Lives
Susan Orlean on the Strange Serendipities That Shape Our Lives

How the roads taken and not taken both lead us to ourselves.

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Hannah Arendt on Time, Space, and Where Our Thinking Ego Resides
Hannah Arendt on Time, Space, and Where Our Thinking Ego Resides

“The everywhere of thought is indeed a region of nowhere.”

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The Science of Why We Cry and the Three Types of Tears
The Science of Why We Cry and the Three Types of Tears

What stress hormones have to do with the social machinery of sympathy.

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Margaret Mead’s Beautiful Letter of Advice to Her Younger Sister on Starting a Family in an Uncertain World
Margaret Mead’s Beautiful Letter of Advice to Her Younger Sister on Starting a Family in an Uncertain World

In praise of “living more intensely and doing better work” whatever life may throw your way.

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