The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Search results for “patti smith”

Mary Oliver on Love and Its Necessary Wildness
Mary Oliver on Love and Its Necessary Wildness

In praise of the “invisible and powerful and uncontrollable and beautiful and possibly even unsuitable.”

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The Six Pillars of the Wholehearted Life: Parker Palmer’s Spectacular Naropa University Commencement Address
The Six Pillars of the Wholehearted Life: Parker Palmer’s Spectacular Naropa University Commencement Address

“Take everything that’s bright and beautiful in you and introduce it to the shadow side of yourself… When you are able to say, ‘I am … my shadow as well as my light,’ the shadow’s power is put in service of the good.”

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Umberto Eco’s Advice to Writers
Umberto Eco’s Advice to Writers

“If we think that our reader is an idiot, we should not use rhetorical figures, but if we use them and feel the need to explain them, we are essentially calling the reader an idiot. In turn, he will take revenge by calling the author an idiot.”

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Turning Trauma into Power: Marina Abramović on How Her Harrowing Childhood Became the Raw Material for Her Art
Turning Trauma into Power: Marina Abramović on How Her Harrowing Childhood Became the Raw Material for Her Art

“You know you are an artist if you have to do art — it’s like breathing and you have no choice. Nothing should be able to stop you.”

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Jack Kerouac on How to Meditate
Jack Kerouac on How to Meditate

An intoxicating homage to the ancient practice that milks the brain’s “good glad fluid.”

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Amanda Palmer’s Extraordinary BBC Open Letter on the Choice to Have a Child as a Working Artist
Amanda Palmer’s Extraordinary BBC Open Letter on the Choice to Have a Child as a Working Artist

“We’re artists — not art factories.”

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Toni Morrison on How to Be Your Own Story and Reap the Rewards of Adulthood in a Culture That Fetishizes Youth
Toni Morrison on How to Be Your Own Story and Reap the Rewards of Adulthood in a Culture That Fetishizes Youth

“True adulthood… is a difficult beauty, an intensely hard won glory, which commercial forces and cultural vapidity should not be permitted to deprive you of.”

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John Waters’s Spectacular RISD Commencement Address on Creative Rebellion and the Artist’s Task to Cause Constructive Chaos
John Waters’s Spectacular RISD Commencement Address on Creative Rebellion and the Artist’s Task to Cause Constructive Chaos

“Refuse to isolate yourself. Separatism is for losers.”

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Reinventing the Secular Sermon: Remarkable Commencement Addresses by Nora Ephron, David Foster Wallace, Ira Glass, and More
Reinventing the Secular Sermon: Remarkable Commencement Addresses by Nora Ephron, David Foster Wallace, Ira Glass, and More

How to live life “on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.”

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William S. Burroughs and Tennessee Williams Talk Writing, Drugs, and Death in 1977
William S. Burroughs and Tennessee Williams Talk Writing, Drugs, and Death in 1977

“Deliberate, conscienceless mendacity, the acceptance of falsehood and hypocrisy, is the most dangerous of all sins.”

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