The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Search results for “joan didion”

Favorite Books of 2022
Favorite Books of 2022

From Rumi to Blake to Nick Cave, by way of trees, hummingbirds, grief, and music.

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Iris Murdoch on the Myth of Closure and the Beautiful, Maddening Blind Spots of Our Self-Knowledge
Iris Murdoch on the Myth of Closure and the Beautiful, Maddening Blind Spots of Our Self-Knowledge

“Judgements on people are never final, they emerge from summings up which at once suggest the need of a reconsideration. Human arrangements are nothing but loose ends and hazy reckoning.”

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Your Brain on Grief, Your Heart on Healing
Your Brain on Grief, Your Heart on Healing

“Grief is a heart-wrenchingly painful problem for the brain to solve… to live in the world with the absence of someone… ingrained in your understanding of the world… For the brain, [they are] simultaneously gone and also everlasting, and you are walking through two worlds at the same time.”

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Losing Love, Finding Love, and Living with the Fragility of It All
Losing Love, Finding Love, and Living with the Fragility of It All

“What an astonishing thing it is to find something. Children, who excel at it — chiefly because the world is still so new to them that they can’t help but notice it — understand this, and automatically delight in it.”

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I Measure Every Grief I Meet: Emily Dickinson on Love and Loss
I Measure Every Grief I Meet: Emily Dickinson on Love and Loss

“‘Tis good — the looking back on Grief.”

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Into the Heart of Life: Richard Powers on Living with Bewilderment at the Otherworldly Wonder of Our World
Into the Heart of Life: Richard Powers on Living with Bewilderment at the Otherworldly Wonder of Our World

“That’s the ruling story on this planet. We live suspended between love and ego.”

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Octavia Butler on the Meaning of God
Octavia Butler on the Meaning of God

On change, the measure of intelligence, the courage to take responsibility for our own lives.

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David Byrne’s Illustrated History of the Possible Future
David Byrne’s Illustrated History of the Possible Future

“The way things were, the way we made things, it turns out, none of it was inevitable — none of it is the way things have to be.”

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Becoming the Marginalian: After 15 Years, Brain Pickings Reborn
Becoming the Marginalian: After 15 Years, Brain Pickings Reborn

Notes from the odyssey of ongoingness, notes for the symphony of aliveness.

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Creativity in the Time of COVID: Zadie Smith on Writing, Love, and What Echoes Through the Hallway of Time Suddenly Emptied of Habit
Creativity in the Time of COVID: Zadie Smith on Writing, Love, and What Echoes Through the Hallway of Time Suddenly Emptied of Habit

“There is no great difference between novels and banana bread. They are both just something to do. They are no substitute for love… Love is not something to do, but… something to go through — that must be why it frightens so many of us and why we so often approach it indirectly.”

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