The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Reads tagged with “books”

Be Still, Life: A Songlike Illustrated Invitation to Living with Presence
Be Still, Life: A Songlike Illustrated Invitation to Living with Presence

“Be still, life, be still at the break of dawn, and you’ll feel the sun’s light when you hear the morning’s song.”

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The Mangrove and the Meaning of Life: Annie Dillard on What Earth’s Most Otherworldly Trees Teach Us About Being Human
The Mangrove and the Meaning of Life: Annie Dillard on What Earth’s Most Otherworldly Trees Teach Us About Being Human

“We don’t know where we belong, but in times of sorrow it doesn’t seem to be here… where space is curved… we’re all going to die, and it seems as wise to stay in bed as budge.”

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Pythagoras on the Purpose of Life and the Meaning of Wisdom
Pythagoras on the Purpose of Life and the Meaning of Wisdom

Abiding insight into the aim of human existence from the man who revolutionized science and coined the word “philosopher.”

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Two Hundred Years of Blue
Two Hundred Years of Blue

Cerulean splendor from Goethe, Thoreau, Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov, Rachel Carson, Toni Morrison, and other literary masters.

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Nabokov’s Synesthetic Alphabet: From the Weathered Wood of A to the Thundercloud of Z
Nabokov’s Synesthetic Alphabet: From the Weathered Wood of A to the Thundercloud of Z

“The long A of the English alphabet… has for me the tint of weathered wood, but a French A evokes polished ebony.”

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Egon Schiele on What It Means to Be an Artist and Why Visionaries Always Come from the Minority
Egon Schiele on What It Means to Be an Artist and Why Visionaries Always Come from the Minority

“Envy those who see beauty in everything in the world.”

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The Universe in Verse: John Cameron Mitchell Reads Walt Whitman’s Beautiful Least Known Poem
The Universe in Verse: John Cameron Mitchell Reads Walt Whitman’s Beautiful Least Known Poem

A lyrical serenade to a world we barely dare imagine and to our kinship with those creatures most different from us.

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The Trailblazing 18th-Century Woman of Letters Germaine de Staël on Ambition and the Crucial Difference Between Ego and Genius
The Trailblazing 18th-Century Woman of Letters Germaine de Staël on Ambition and the Crucial Difference Between Ego and Genius

“True glory cannot be obtained by relative celebrity.”

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Life, Loss, and the Wisdom of Rivers
Life, Loss, and the Wisdom of Rivers

“It’s a mercy that time runs in one direction only, that we see the past but darkly and the future not at all.”

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Optimism: A Poetic Stop-Motion Celebration of Nature’s Resilience and the Persistence of Life Against All Odds
Optimism: A Poetic Stop-Motion Celebration of Nature’s Resilience and the Persistence of Life Against All Odds

A spare and lovely ode to that which we so easily forget yet which animates the center of existence.

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