The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Reads tagged with “language”

French Philosopher Maurice Blanchot on Writing, the Dual Power of Language to Reveal and Conceal, and What It Really Means to See
French Philosopher Maurice Blanchot on Writing, the Dual Power of Language to Reveal and Conceal, and What It Really Means to See

“To see is certainly always to see at a distance, but by allowing distance to give back what it removes from us… To see is to experience the continuous and to celebrate the sun, that is, beyond the sun: the One.”

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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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Ursula K. Le Guin on Art, Storytelling, and the Power of Language to Transform and Redeem
Ursula K. Le Guin on Art, Storytelling, and the Power of Language to Transform and Redeem

“One of the functions of art is to give people the words to know their own experience… Storytelling is a tool for knowing who we are and what we want.”

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Meet Mary Somerville: The Brilliant Woman for Whom the Word “Scientist” Was Coined
Meet Mary Somerville: The Brilliant Woman for Whom the Word “Scientist” Was Coined

How a Scottish polymath forever changed the course of gender in science and made a high art of connecting the seemingly disconnected.

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Storytelling and the Power of Language: Toni Morrison’s Spectacular Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech
Storytelling and the Power of Language: Toni Morrison’s Spectacular Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech

“We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”

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Poet and Philosopher David Whyte on Love and Resisting the Tyranny of Relationship Labels
Poet and Philosopher David Whyte on Love and Resisting the Tyranny of Relationship Labels

“We name mostly in order to control but what is worth loving does not want to be held within the bounds of too narrow a calling. In many ways love has already named us before we can even begin to speak back to it.”

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Nietzsche on Truth, Lies, the Power and Peril of Metaphor, and How We Use Language to Reveal and Conceal Reality
Nietzsche on Truth, Lies, the Power and Peril of Metaphor, and How We Use Language to Reveal and Conceal Reality

“What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished…”

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Six Dots: The Remarkable Life and Legacy of Child Inventor Louis Braille, Illustrated
Six Dots: The Remarkable Life and Legacy of Child Inventor Louis Braille, Illustrated

How a tenacious boy created one of the most life-changing inventions in human history.

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The Conscience of Words: Susan Sontag on the Wisdom of Literature, the Danger of Opinions, and the Writer’s Task
The Conscience of Words: Susan Sontag on the Wisdom of Literature, the Danger of Opinions, and the Writer’s Task

“A writer ought not to be an opinion-machine… The job of the writer is to make us see the world as it is, full of many different claims and parts and experiences.”

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Finding Poetry in Other Lives: James Baldwin on Shakespeare, Language as a Tool of Love, and the Poet’s Responsibility to a Divided Society
Finding Poetry in Other Lives: James Baldwin on Shakespeare, Language as a Tool of Love, and the Poet’s Responsibility to a Divided Society

“The greatest poet in the English language found his poetry where poetry is found: in the lives of the people. He could have done this only through love — by knowing… that whatever was happening to anyone was happening to him.”

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