The Marginalian
The Marginalian

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Nobel Laureate André Gide on What It Really Means to Be Original and Goethe’s Paradoxical Model of Creativity
Nobel Laureate André Gide on What It Really Means to Be Original and Goethe’s Paradoxical Model of Creativity

“If one does not absorb everything, one loses oneself completely. The mind must be greater than the world and contain it…”

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The Value of Not Understanding Everything: Grace Paley’s Advice to Aspiring Writers
The Value of Not Understanding Everything: Grace Paley’s Advice to Aspiring Writers

“Luckily for art, life is difficult, hard to understand, useless, and mysterious.”

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Teenage Sylvia Plath’s Letters to Her Mother on the Joy of Living and Writing as Salvation and Sustenance for the Spirit
Teenage Sylvia Plath’s Letters to Her Mother on the Joy of Living and Writing as Salvation and Sustenance for the Spirit

“I want to be affected by life deeply, but never so blinded that I cannot see my share of existence in a wry, humorous light…”

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Virginia Woolf on the Elasticity of Time
Virginia Woolf on the Elasticity of Time

“An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length.”

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Young Delacroix on the Importance of Solitude in Creative Work and How to Resist Social Distractions
Young Delacroix on the Importance of Solitude in Creative Work and How to Resist Social Distractions

“Nourish yourself with grand and austere ideas of beauty that feed the soul… Seek solitude.”

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Teenage Sylvia Plath’s First Tragic Poem, with a Touching Remembrance by Her Mother
Teenage Sylvia Plath’s First Tragic Poem, with a Touching Remembrance by Her Mother

“Once a poem is made available to the public, the right of interpretation belongs to the reader.”

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Oliver Sacks on Storytelling, the Curious Psychology of Writing, and What His Poet Friend Taught Him About the Nature of Creativity
Oliver Sacks on Storytelling, the Curious Psychology of Writing, and What His Poet Friend Taught Him About the Nature of Creativity

“The act of writing is an integral part of my mental life; ideas emerge, are shaped, in the act of writing… a special, indispensable form of talking to myself.”

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The Diffusion of Useful Ignorance: Thoreau on the Hubris of Our Knowledge and the Transcendent Humility of Not-Knowing
The Diffusion of Useful Ignorance: Thoreau on the Hubris of Our Knowledge and the Transcendent Humility of Not-Knowing

“My desire for knowledge is intermittent, but my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant.”

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Thoreau on the Sacredness of Libraries and His Ideal Sanctuary for Books
Thoreau on the Sacredness of Libraries and His Ideal Sanctuary for Books

“Those old books suggested a certain fertility … as if they were making a humus for new literatures to spring in.”

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Virginia Woolf on Why the Best Mind Is the Nonbinary Mind
Virginia Woolf on Why the Best Mind Is the Nonbinary Mind

“In each of us two powers preside, one male, one female… The androgynous mind is resonant and porous… naturally creative, incandescent and undivided.”

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