The Marginalian

It seems to me that love should not make all else disappear but should simply tint it with new nuances; I would like a love that accompanies me through life, not that absorbs all my life.

Something sharp runs through me which is my love for them... This is not intellectual love. This is a love for souls, from all of me towards all of them in their entirety.

The creative aspect of life, which finds its clearest expression in art, baffles all attempts at rational formation. Any reaction to stimulus may be causally explained; but the creative act, which is the absolute antithesis of mere reaction, will forever elude the human understanding. It can only be described in its manifestations; it can be obscur... See more

The very few — those who refuse to mistake the limits of the permissible for the horizon of the possible — will build a whole new table, populating the fresh slate of its surface with options others have not dared imagine. These are the visionaries — the only people who have ever changed this world.

And salve it we must, yet there is no damnation greater than spending our allotted days in the catatonia of comfort and certainty, our inner lives automated by habit and halogen lit by convenience. To try to save ourselves from the despair by which we contour hope, to spare ourselves the fertile doubt and the gasps of self-surprise by which we disc... See more

burnout is “a loss of friendship with a very personal sense of the unknown”

“Enough is so vast a sweetness, I suppose it never occurs, only pathetic counterfeits,” Emily Dickinson sighed in one of her love letters to Susan an epoch

History is not inert but contains within it a story that implicates or justifies political order... A political order is premised not just on who can vote but on what they can vote for, which is to say on what can be imagined. And our political imagination is rooted in our history, our culture, and our myths.

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Politics is the art of the possible

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Writing, Coates recalls, was one of the great “obsessions” of his childhood — he relished the “private ecstasy” found in “the organization of words, silences, and sound into stories,” in “the employment of particular verbs, the playful placement of punctuation,” this mysterious alchemy of skill and vision with the power to “make the abstract and di... See more