The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Search results for “james baldwin”

How We Co-Create and Recreate the World: Octavio Paz on Sor Juana, Poetry as Rebellion, and the Creative Collaboration Between Writers and Readers
How We Co-Create and Recreate the World: Octavio Paz on Sor Juana, Poetry as Rebellion, and the Creative Collaboration Between Writers and Readers

“A work responds to the reader’s, not the author’s, questions.”

read article

How to Make the Best of Life: A Visionary Victorian Recipe for Lasting Self-Actualization
How to Make the Best of Life: A Visionary Victorian Recipe for Lasting Self-Actualization

“Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.”

read article

Nathaniel Hawthorne on How to Look and Really See
Nathaniel Hawthorne on How to Look and Really See

“The mystery is revealed, and after a breath or two, becomes just as great a mystery as before.”

read article

What Makes Great Art: The Single Most Important Element in Creative Work
What Makes Great Art: The Single Most Important Element in Creative Work

“Art is a miracle, superior to the laws.”

read article

The Human Kaleidoscope and the Unwritten Story of the World: “Radiolab” Creator Jad Abumrad’s Superb Caltech Commencement Address
The Human Kaleidoscope and the Unwritten Story of the World: “Radiolab” Creator Jad Abumrad’s Superb Caltech Commencement Address

A ten-year-old boy on the side of a Lebanese mountain road, three generations of monarch butterflies, and the history of the future.

read article

Nobel Laureate Wisława Szymborska’s Poem “Love at First Sight,” Illustrated
Nobel Laureate Wisława Szymborska’s Poem “Love at First Sight,” Illustrated

“Every beginning is only a sequel, after all, and the book of events is always open halfway through.”

read article

A Different Solitude: Pioneering Aviator Beryl Markham on What She Learned About Life in the Bottomless Night
A Different Solitude: Pioneering Aviator Beryl Markham on What She Learned About Life in the Bottomless Night

“I learned what every dreaming child needs to know — that no horizon is so far that you cannot get above it or beyond it.”

read article

To the Young Who Want to Die: Roxane Gay Reads Gwendolyn Brooks’s Lifeline of a Poem
To the Young Who Want to Die: Roxane Gay Reads Gwendolyn Brooks’s Lifeline of a Poem

“The gun will wait. The lake will wait. The tall gall in the small seductive vial will wait will wait.”

read article

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.”

read article

Poet Mark Doty on Connection and Creativity
Poet Mark Doty on Connection and Creativity

“We are all co-extensive, and our work is to move toward union… We must know our fellows in order for everything to move forward; it is our spiritual imperative to connect, or else the destiny of the world cannot be completed.”

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.)