"The sea does not reward those who are too anxious, too greedy, or too impatient... Patience, patience, patience, is what the sea teaches. Patience and faith. One should lie empty, open, choicele...
https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/06/13/anne-morrow-lindbergh-sea/
"An exquisite peace obtains: a drowsy, golden peace, flowing honey-sweet over my dwelling, soaking it, dripping like music from the walls... A peace for gods; a divine emptiness."
https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/06/13/rose-macaulay-personal-pleasures/
"There is no description of a life without an account of the changes that are possible within it."
https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/06/05/on-wanting-to-change-adam-phillips/
“You will never get any more out of life than you expect,” Bruce Lee wrote to himself. All expectation is a story of the possible. Every person lives inside a story of who they are, what they...
https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/06/03/john-quincy-adams-impostor-syndrome-success/
"The mind narrates what the nervous system knows. Story follows state."
"We must live it, now, a day at a time and be very careful not to hurt each other."
https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/05/21/hemingway-loss-letter/
"Not being able to give up is not to be able to allow for loss, for vulnerability; not to be able to allow for the passing of time, and the revisions it brings."
https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/05/17/adam-phillips-giving-up/
"The potentialities you develop to the full come as the result of an interplay between you and life's challenges."
https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/05/15/gardner-self-renewal-meaning/
“The true artist,” Beethoven wrote in his touching letter of advice to a young girl aspiring to be an artist, “is sad not to have reached that point to which his better genius only appears ...
https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/05/01/the-work-of-art-adam-moss/
"Whatever returns from oblivion returns to find a voice."
https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/04/29/louse-gluck-wild-iris/
"Each world bears all the worlds we might find within it. If you understand one outcropping of stone, or one wildflower, or one hummingbird — if we see our way along the tracery of cause and ef...
https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/04/26/paradise-notebooks/
"Loving is perennial vivification... a centrifugal act of the soul in constant flux that goes toward the object and envelops it in warm corroboration, uniting us with it and positively affirming ...
https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/04/24/ortega-love-desire/
Each time I see a sparrow inside an airport, I am seized with tenderness for the bird, for living so acutely and concretely a paradox that haunts our human lives in myriad guises — the difficul...
https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/04/21/gail-sheehy-merger-seeker-passages/
"Experiences of shame throw a flooding light on what and who we are and what the world we live in is."
"Despite what dictionaries would have us believe, this world is still mostly undefined."
https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/04/12/dictionary-of-obscure-sorrows/
"We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos."
"If it comes, it comes; if it does not come, no process of reasoning can force it. Yet it transforms the value of the creature loved."
https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/04/03/william-james-on-love/
"A reanimated world is one in which spirit and matter are not just equally regarded but recognized as mutually dependent."
You know that the price of life is death, that the price of love is loss, and still you watch the golden afternoon light fall on a face you love, knowing that the light will soon fade, knowing th...
"At the end of my life, I know I won’t be wishing I’d held more back, been less effusive, more often stood on ceremony, forgiven less, spent more days oblivious to the secret wishes and fears...