The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Reads tagged with “diaries”

The Love of Life in the Face of Death: Keith Haring on Self-Doubt, the Fragility of Being, and Creativity as the Antidote to Our Mortal Anxiety
The Love of Life in the Face of Death: Keith Haring on Self-Doubt, the Fragility of Being, and Creativity as the Antidote to Our Mortal Anxiety

“It is very important to be in love with life… Life is very fragile and always elusive. As soon as we think we ‘understand,’ there is another mystery. I don’t understand anything. That is, I think, the key to understand everything.”

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Calculating the Incalculable: Thoreau on the True Value of a Tree
Calculating the Incalculable: Thoreau on the True Value of a Tree

“What would human life be without forests, those natural cities?”

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Through the First Antarctic Night: A Pioneering Polar Explorer on the Resilience of the Human Spirit
Through the First Antarctic Night: A Pioneering Polar Explorer on the Resilience of the Human Spirit

“There was a naked fierceness in the scenes, a boisterous wildness in the storms, a sublimity and silence in the still, cold dayless nights, which were too impressive to be entirely overshadowed by the soul-despairing depression.”

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15-Year-Old Susan Sontag on the Explosive Elasticity of the Self
15-Year-Old Susan Sontag on the Explosive Elasticity of the Self

“All that animates me and is the original and responsive desire that constitutes my ‘self’ — all this takes on a definite shape and size — far too large to be contained by the structure I call my body.”

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Darkness in the Celestial Lighthouse: Virginia Woolf’s Arresting 1927 Account of a Total Solar Eclipse
Darkness in the Celestial Lighthouse: Virginia Woolf’s Arresting 1927 Account of a Total Solar Eclipse

“We had seen the world dead. This was within the power of nature.”

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Virginia Woolf on Why We Read and What Great Works of Art Have in Common
Virginia Woolf on Why We Read and What Great Works of Art Have in Common

“Our minds are all threaded together… Any live mind today is of the very same stuff as Plato’s & Euripides. It is only a continuation & development of the same thing. It is this common mind that binds the whole world together; & all the world is mind.”

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Edward Weston on the Most Fruitful Attitude Toward Life, Art, and Other People
Edward Weston on the Most Fruitful Attitude Toward Life, Art, and Other People

“I feel towards persons as I do towards art, — constructively.”

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Visionary Photographer Edward Weston on the Importance of Cross-Disciplinary Curiosity in Creative Work
Visionary Photographer Edward Weston on the Importance of Cross-Disciplinary Curiosity in Creative Work

“In this age of communication… who can be free from influence, — preconception? But — it all depends upon what one does with this cross-fertilization: — is it digested, or does it bring indigestion?”

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How to Keep Criticism from Sinking Your Soul: Walt Whitman and the Discipline of Creative Confidence
How to Keep Criticism from Sinking Your Soul: Walt Whitman and the Discipline of Creative Confidence

“I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood.”

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Audre Lorde on Kinship Across Difference and the Importance of Unity Within Movements for Equality and Social Change
Audre Lorde on Kinship Across Difference and the Importance of Unity Within Movements for Equality and Social Change

“How can we use each other’s differences in our common battles for a livable future?”

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