Maria Popova
@brainpicker
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Reader. Writer. Creator of The Marginalian (long ago named Brain Pickings). Author of #Figuring . Lover of trees. Petter of moss. Rider of a cobalt blue bicycle.
Brooklyn, NY
Joined October 2007
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17 life-learnings from 17 years of The Marginalian
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Watch to the end. The most optimistic thing I’ve seen in ages. If this tiny friend can make it across the abyss, and with such uncomplicated grace, so can we. (Nail for snail scale.)
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“Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself… It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.”
C.S. Lewis, born on this day in 1898, on true friendship – just wonderful:
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“The constellations of solidarity, altruism, and improvisation are within most of us and reappear at these times.”
Rebecca Solnit on cataclysm as a catalyst for dignity, agency, and human goodness
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“Books are key to understanding the world and participating in a democratic society.”
Carl Sagan, born on this day in 1934, on reading as an essential instrument of citizenship
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“Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.”
One of the finest, sharpest, most poetic things ever written about time, by Borges, born on this day in 1899:
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“Love, like strength and courage, is a strange thing; the more we give the more we find we have to give.”
Read the letters of a forgotten Victorian woman who lived and died with uncommon courage against the tide of her time:
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Barack Obama and Michelle Robinson were married on this day 1992. His lovely reflection on the secret to their mutually sustaining marriage and what his mom taught him about love:
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If the ancient Arab world had banned Western travelers from its borders, we’d have no mathematics, no astronomy, no medicine.
#MuslimBan
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That moment you do yoga on your roof and look up and there is a rainbow smiling at you. And then you think about the rainbow as a metaphor for understanding consciousness:
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In these historic times for American politics, I'm reminded of Hannah Arendt's timeless astuteness: “No matter how large the tissue of falsehood that an experienced liar has to offer, it will never be large enough … to cover the immensity of factuality.”
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My Heart – an emotional intelligence primer in the form of an illustrated poem about our elastic capacity for love
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“Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness. All other travel is mere dust and hotels and baggage and chatter."
John Muir was born 180 years ago today. A cinematic love letter to his legacy:
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Some people express surprise that I take a political stance. I'm supposed to write about literature, philosophy, science, they say. But you can't read and reverence James Baldwin or Virginia Woolf or Rachel Carson without civil rights and women's rights and environmental justice.
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“Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.”
Writing advice from James Baldwin, born 96 years ago today:
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"Peter Rabbit" creator Beatrix Potter, born on this day in 1866, was a skilled self-taught mycologist whose stunning drawings of mushrooms scientists use to this day to identify species:
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“Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.”
On James Baldwin's birthday, his no-nonsense advice on writing:
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This Emily Dickinson poem ought to be the Internet's code of conduct. And life's.
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"One person, … one person of integrity, can make a difference, a difference of life and death." Elie Wiesel, now
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I grew up in Bulgaria under a communist dictatorship, was raised on the ideal of America as the land of democracy and possibility, came here alone six days after my 19th birthday, landing in Pennsylvania. Thank you, Pennsylvania, for redeeming a child's dream and a world's ideal.
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15 years ago today, I woke up on my first day in America, having arrived alone as a teenage immigrant from Eastern Europe with $800 cobbled together to last me a year. I wonder how my life would have turned out if immigration policies and attitudes were what they are today.
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Katherine Johnson, who calculated Apollo 11’s launch windows, turns 100 today — a hero in incalculable ways
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“We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”
31 years ago today, Elie Wiesel delivered his timeless, hugely timely Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech:
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I've seen abuses of power growing up in communism, but none like this. This, THIS is the time for resistance on every scale of civic life.
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On my run this morning, I was stopped mid-stride by this stunning reminder that beauty and wonder are so often a matter of the subtlest shift in vantage point.
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“We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”
Toni Morrison turns 88 today. When she became the first black woman to win a Nobel, she received it with this superb speech on the power of language:
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"If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves"
Neruda's stunning ode to silence:
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Brain Pickings was born 15 years ago today. Today, it is reborn as The Marginalian.
Here is everything there is to say about the change — the most personal piece I have ever published:
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"(How frail the human heart must be —
a throbbing pulse, a trembling thing —
a fragile, shining instrument
of crystal, which can either weep,
or sing.)"
Sylvia Plath would have been 87 today.
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“We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”
Now more than ever, time to heed and enact Elie Wiesel's wisdom:
#ExecutiveOrder
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Ray Bradbury would have been 99 today.
@neilhimself
reads “The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury” – his lovely poem-present for his hero's 91st and final birthday
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“Art like prayer is a hand outstretched in the darkness, seeking for some touch of grace which will transform it into a hand that bestows gifts.”
Kafka, born on this day in 1883, on the power of music and the point of making art:
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“Words have more power than any one can guess; it is by words that the world’s great fight, now in these civilized times, is carried on.”
Frankenstein author Mary Shelley, born on this day in 1797, on the courage to speak up against injustice
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I have written a children's book. It is a true story — a love story, a science story, a story about the poetry of existence, about time and chance, genetics and gender, evolution and infinity, about diversity as nature’s wellspring of resilience and beauty
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“Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.”
James Baldwin's advice on writing (which applies, come to think of it, to so much in life):
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50 years ago today, Apollo 11 landed on the Moon, thanks to the work of mathematician Katherine Johnson, who calculated its launch windows and who is celebrating her 101st birthday next month
#Apollo50th
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Lift your heart every Sunday morning with the free Brain Pickings weekly newsletter:
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“Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.”
Baldwin, a writer of towering talent and tenacity, died on this day in 1987. His advice on writing:
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Thrilled to announce a labor of love 8 years (!!) in the making: "A Velocity of Being" — a collection of illustrated letters to children about why we read and how books shape our character by 121 of the most inspiring people in our world:
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Dec 2016's avg global temp was 3rd highest on record. Global avg atmospheric CO2 concentration was ~405 ppm.
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10 years ago today, Brain Pickings was born. (Time!) Here are my 10 most important learnings from the first decade:
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The first image of a black hole just revealed at the
@NSF
press conference.
@EHTelescope
director Shep Doeleman: Taking a picture of a black hole is the equivalent of being able to read the date on a quarter in LA from Washington, DC.
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“There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.”
Thinking today of Toni Morrison's wisdom on the artist's task in times of catastrophe:
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“Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.”
James Baldwin's advice on writing
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“In forty years of medical practice, I have found only two types of non-pharmaceutical ‘therapy’ to be vitally important for patients with chronic neurological diseases: music and gardens.”
Oliver Sacks on the healing power of gardens and nature:
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The first full Moon of the year is known as the Wolf Moon. Can’t think of anything lovelier than its hazy beauty to celebrate my new telescope, which I just finished assembling. (A sprightly portable Orion StarBlast II 4.5 equatorial reflector, for the curious.)
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"Be a good steward of your gifts. Protect your time. Feed your inner life. Avoid too much noise. Read good books, have good sentences in your ears. Be by yourself as often as you can. Walk."
From poet Jane Kenyon, some mighty resolutions to live by:
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We know next to nothing about the lives of others, so when we encounter one another, we must rise to assume everyone is doing their best.
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“Practice kindness all day to everybody and you will realize you’re already in heaven now.”
Jack Kerouac, born on this day in 1922, on kindness, the self illusion, and the "Golden Eternity"
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“Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.”
James Baldwin's advice on writing (which applies, come to think of it, to so much in life):
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"How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me."
#Figuring
is out today. The story of the Auden poem in the epigraph, with a stunning reading by
@JannaLevin
:
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Brain Pickings turns 14 today. Since it turned 7, I've been distilling the single most important thing I learned each year in reading and writing my way through life. Here is the one from the past year, by far the most challenging I've lived through:
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Rachel Carson's brave and prescient 1953 letter against the government's assault on science and nature
#ShePersisted
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One measure of closeness: How well two people hold silences between them.
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"Do not go gentle into that good night
Rage, rage against the dying of the light"
The story behind Dylan Thomas's famous poem and a rare recording of the poet himself reading it:
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“…for there is always light
if we are brave enough to see it
if we are brave enough
to be it.”
And how the light alighted to her ear, that supreme instrument of empathy, which is the crucible of courage. Brava and thank you,
@TheAmandaGorman
. A brave new world.
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With increasing regularity, I'm reminded of what a cesspool of reactionary self-righteousness social media can be, how ill-considered people's opinions are, how bereft of historical context and impoverished of nuance. We can do better.
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Holocaust survivor Helen Fagin, who turns 102 today (and who happens to be
@neilhimself
's amazing cousin), on how books save lives – a stirring letter to children, recounting the true story of how a particular book saved particular lives when she was young
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On this day in 1959, physicist Lise Meitner — who discovered nuclear fission, but was excluded from the Nobel Prize for her own discovery — delivered her only direct remarks on what it was like to be a woman in a millennia-old boys' club
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The borderline between day and night. I often feel that borderlines and liminal states are the most beautiful frontiers of existence.
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In 2016, space beckoned back too many stars and oddities:
★Bowie
★Prince
★Leonard Cohen
★Vera Rubin
★Carrie Fisher
#StardustToStardust
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“In any art you’re allowed to steal anything if you can make it better.”
On Hemingway's birthday, his advice on writing, ambition, and the essential books every aspiring writer should read:
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"As long as there is one upright man, as long as there is one compassionate woman, the contagion may spread and the scene is not desolate."
E.B. White's beautiful letter to a man who had lost faith in humanity
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“We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.”
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I must interrupt this program (typically disinterested in the present, which will soon be past) just to say: Fucking hooray. I was born into a dictatorship, stood vigil before Parliament with a candle in my child-hands to watch the tyrant topple. Democracy prevails in the end.
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“An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian. His role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are.”
Happy birthday, James Baldwin
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Having survived a communist dictatorship, I know two things: This is terrible. This is survivable.
#resist
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That moment when you grasp in your bones why Dr. King was such a remarkable human being for upholding nonviolence in enraging circumstances.
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“We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”
Toni Morrison turns 87 today. When she became the first black woman to win a Nobel, she gave this remarkable acceptance speech on the power of language:
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“We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”
Elie Wiesel would have been 90 today. His timely Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech:
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“Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.”
James Baldwin's advice on writing:
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On top of everything, Leonard Cohen died. Devastated. May we always remember:"There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in."
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“We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”
On this day in 1993, Toni Morrison became the first black woman to win the Nobel Prize. Her remarkable acceptance speech about the power of language:
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“Those who tell you ‘Do not put too much politics in your art… are the same people who are quite happy with the situation as it is… What they are saying is don’t upset the system.”
On Achebe's birthday, his fantastic forgotten conversation with Baldwin:
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“We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”
On this day in 1986, Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel delivered his timeless Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech:
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Remembering Ursula K. Le Guin, who died 4 years ago today, with one of the funniest, fiercest, most insightful things ever written about gender
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“Hate, in the long run, is about as nourishing as cyanide.”
Happy birthday, Vonnegut
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Patti Smith, who turns 74 today, on libraries and how reading transforms lives
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Albert Camus – who died on this day in 1960 in a car crash, with an unused train ticket to the same destination in his pocket – on our search for meaning and why happiness is our moral obligation
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"We have an obligation to support libraries. To use libraries, to encourage others to use libraries, to protest the closure of libraries."
#NationalLibraryWeek
with
@neilhimself
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“Those who tell you ‘Do not put too much politics in your art… are the same people who are quite happy with the situation as it is… What they are saying is don’t upset the system.”
On Achebe's birthday, his fantastic forgotten conversation with Baldwin:
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"Be a good steward of your gifts. Protect your time. Feed your inner life. Avoid too much noise. Read good books, have good sentences in your ears. Be by yourself as often as you can. Walk."
From poet Jane Kenyon, spectacular advice on writing and life:
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“If it is right, it happens — The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.”
60 years ago today, in a letter to his lovestruck teenage son, Steinbeck offered some of the finest advice on love anyone could heed:
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The Marginalian was born 16 years ago today (under the outgrown name Brain Pickings). Here are 16 things I've learned about life over the years (and the untold origin story)
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Duck, Death, and the Tulip – an uncommonly tender illustrated meditation on the cycle of life
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Leonard Cohen, who would have been 86 today and brokenhearted at the state of this world, on saving democracy from itself – may we use our own breakages of heart to let the light get in
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“Those who tell you ‘Do not put too much politics in your art’ are not being honest. If you look very carefully you will see that they are the same people who are quite happy with the situation as it is… What they are saying is don’t upset the system.”
Remembering Chinua Achebe, who died on this day in 2013, with his fantastic forgotten conversation with James Baldwin:
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“If you can fall in love again and again… if you can forgive as well as forget, if you can keep from growing sour, surly, bitter and cynical… you’ve got it half licked.”
Henry Miller, born on this day in 1891, on the measure of a life well lived:
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“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, born on this day in 1905, on our search for meaning
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"You can only go with loves in this life."
Ray Bradbury, born 99 years ago today, on emotion and creativity:
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“The truth is, most of us discover where we are headed when we arrive.”
Wisdom on life and creative integrity from Calvin & Hobbes creator Bill Watterson, who turns 61 today:
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As we watch the senseless ruin of a 240-year-old country, let's try to make outrage not a paralyzing force but a mobilizing one.
#resist
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"Sometimes it only takes a stranger, in a dark place,
to hold out a badly-knitted scarf, to offer a kind word, to say
we have the right to be here, to make us warm in the coldest season."
On a dark, unbelonging night of the soul, solace from
@neilhimself
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"Blue is the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in."
200 years of blue, from Goethe to Solnit
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“Love the earth and sun and the animals… re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul…”
Walt Whitman died on this day in 1892 and left us one of the most beautiful credos to live by:
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Yesterday, just as I was thrashing about in the self-erected cage of unreasonable impatience, I looked down and saw this sweet teacher.
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To the man who chased me down a city block to return my dropped wallet and bike light as I was galloping to catch the sunset ferry: Thank you for reminding me that humans are kind. And also scatteredbrained when in grief. (Forgot my entire bike on the other side of the river.)
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I reread
@neilhimself
's 8 rules of writing at least once a year, every year, for basic mental hygiene
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“I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other.”
I keep coming back to this Rilke treasure – some of the wisest advice on love ever committed to words:
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