The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Reads tagged with “letters”

John Steinbeck on the Loneliness of Success and His Surprising Source of Self-Salvation
John Steinbeck on the Loneliness of Success and His Surprising Source of Self-Salvation

“The loneliness and discouragement… I can’t talk to anyone much about them or even admit having them because I now possess the things that the great majority of people think are the death of loneliness and discouragement.”

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Love Beyond Label: The Tender Letters of Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms
Love Beyond Label: The Tender Letters of Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms

“I would gladly write to you only by means of music, but I have things to say to you to-day which music could not express.”

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The Binary Code of Body and Spirit: Computing Pioneer Alan Turing on Mortality
The Binary Code of Body and Spirit: Computing Pioneer Alan Turing on Mortality

“The body provides something for the spirit to look after and use.”

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Rachel Carson’s Brave and Prescient 1953 Letter Against the Government’s Assault on Science and Nature
Rachel Carson’s Brave and Prescient 1953 Letter Against the Government’s Assault on Science and Nature

“The real wealth of the Nation lies in the resources of the earth — soil, water, forests, minerals, and wildlife… Their administration is not properly, and cannot be, a matter of politics.”

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May Sarton on the Artist’s Duty to Contact the Timeless in Tumultuous Times
May Sarton on the Artist’s Duty to Contact the Timeless in Tumultuous Times

“Now it has become impossible to guard one’s soul… We are forced to read the papers, and yet… our job is somehow or other to be above the mêlée, or so deeply in it that one comes through to something else, something universal and timeless.”

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How the French Mathematician Sophie Germain Paved the Way for Women in Science and Endeavored to Save Gauss’s Life
How the French Mathematician Sophie Germain Paved the Way for Women in Science and Endeavored to Save Gauss’s Life

“The taste for the abstract sciences in general and, above all, for the mysteries of numbers, is very rare… since the charms of this sublime science in all their beauty reveal themselves only to those who have the courage to fathom them.”

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How to Know Yourself: Poet Laura Riding’s Extraordinary 1930 Letters to an 8-Year-Old Girl
How to Know Yourself: Poet Laura Riding’s Extraordinary 1930 Letters to an 8-Year-Old Girl

“People who for some reason find it impossible to think about themselves, and so really be themselves, try to make up for not thinking with doing.”

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Italo Calvino on Racial Justice: The Beloved Italian Writer’s Stirring Account of the Early Civil Rights Movement and His Encounter with Martin Luther King, Jr.
Italo Calvino on Racial Justice: The Beloved Italian Writer’s Stirring Account of the Early Civil Rights Movement and His Encounter with Martin Luther King, Jr.

“What counts is what we are, and the way we deepen our relationship with the world and with others, a relationship that can be one of both love for all that exists and of desire for its transformation.”

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The Joy of Suffering Overcome: Young Beethoven’s Stirring Letter to His Brothers About the Loneliness of Living with Deafness and How Music Saved His Life
The Joy of Suffering Overcome: Young Beethoven’s Stirring Letter to His Brothers About the Loneliness of Living with Deafness and How Music Saved His Life

“Ah! how could I possibly quit the world before bringing forth all that I felt it was my vocation to produce?”

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Poet, Painter, and Philosopher Kahlil Gibran on Creativity
Poet, Painter, and Philosopher Kahlil Gibran on Creativity

“There is no deeper desire than the desire of being revealed. We all want that little light in us to be taken from under the bushel.”

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