The Marginalian

"Creative fantasy, because it is mainly trying to do something else … may open your hoard and let all the locked things fly away like cage-birds." "I do not believe that I have ever written a children's book," the great Maurice Sendak once said in an inte

"Rage, rage against the dying of the light." "Poetry can break open locked chambers of possibility, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire," Adrienne Rich wrote in contemplating what poetry does. "Insofar as poetry has a social function it is to

"The most important possible thing you can do is do a lot of work."

Against the morphological backdrop of the rest of nature, a giant pink bird on stilts sounds like something out of Lewis Carroll's imagination. And yet flamingos came out of evolution's…

"Often the object of a desire, when desire is transformed into hope, becomes more real than reality itself."

Sylvan sublimity between the heavens and the deep blue sea.

Nothing changes the history of the world more profoundly than changing the landscape of permission and possibility for people - what is possible and permissible for whom in a given culture. A…

You wouldn't have bet on it, this battered rock orbiting a star from the discount bin of the universe, you wouldn't have bet that it would bloom mitochondria and music, that it would mu…

The art-science that captured the wonder of some of "the most brilliant productions of Nature."