books

The Gospel of James Baldwin: Musician Meshell Ndegeocello Rekindles the Fire of Truth for a New Time that Was Once a Next Time

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.” …

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Octavia Butler on Creative Drive, the World-Building Power of Our Desires, and How We Become Who We Are

“Love quiets fear. And a sweet and powerful positive obsession blunts pain, diverts rage, and engages each of us in the greatest, the most intense of our chosen struggles.” …

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Being but Men: Astronomer Natalie Batalha Reads Dylan Thomas’s Cosmic Serenade to Trees and the Wonder of Being Human

“Children in wonder watching the stars, is the aim and the end.” …

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How Alive Are We? Alan Turing, Trees, and the Wonder of Life

“The more a creature’s life is worth, the less of it is alive.” …

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Tenacity, the Art of Integration, and the Key to a Flexible Mind: Wisdom from the Life of Mary Somerville, for Whom the Word “Scientist” Was Coined

Inside the hallmark of a great scientist and a great human being — the ability to hold one’s opinions with firm but unfisted fingers. …

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Poetry Is Not a Luxury: Audre Lorde on the Courage to Feel as an Antidote to Fear and a Fulcrum of Action, Power, and Possibility

“The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized.” …

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Bruce Lee on Death and What It Takes to Be an Artist of Life

“The intangible represents the real power of the universe. It is the seed of the tangible. It is living void because all forms come out of it, and whosoever realizes the void is filled with life and power and the love of all beings.” …

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Every Color of Light: A Stunning Japanese Illustrated Celebration of Change, the Sky, and the Fullness of Life

A synesthetic invitation to dance across the full span of the spectrum within and without. …

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The Unwinding: An Uncommonly Enchanting Painted Poem Celebrating the Wilderness of the Imagination and Our Capacity for Love, Trust, and Hope

“If I said that my love for you was like the spaces between the notes of a wren’s song, would you understand?” …

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John Muir on the Calm Assurance of Autumn as a Time of Renewal and Nature as a Tonic for Mental and Physical Health

“Although the dying time, it is also the color time, the time when faith in the steadfastness of Nature is surest… The seeds all have next summer in them, some of them thousands of summers.” …

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Emily Dickinson’s Revolutionary and Reclusive Life, in a Lyrical Picture-Book from the Lacuna Between Fact and Myth

…and one of the loveliest definitions of what poetry is. …

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Inspiring Books by Female Politicians That’ll Fire You Up

These biographies are #lifegoals. …

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The Big Picture: Ellen Bass’s Immense and Intimate Poem of Perspective and Persistence, Read by Amanda Palmer

On the precious smallnesses that matter amid the vast and transitory maelstrom of matter. …

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Sappho’s Timeless Elegy for Heartbreak at the End of Love, Reimagined in a Haunting Choral Invocation

“Rejoice, go and remember me.” …

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Bertrand Russell on the Two Most Vital Things for Human Flourishing

“Love is wise, hatred is foolish.” …

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How an Artist is Like a Tree: Paul Klee on Creativity

“Nobody would affirm that the tree grows its crown in the image of its root. Between above and below can be no mirrored reflection.” …

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Frederick Douglass on the Wisdom of the Minority and the Real Meaning of Solidarity

“There are times in the experience of almost every community… when… the appointed leaders… exert their powers of mind to complicate, mystify, entangle and obscure the simple truth… to mislead the popular mind, and to corrupt the public heart, — then the humblest may stand forth… opposing… the torrent of evil.” …

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13-Year-Old Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Prejudice, Its Antidote, and the Five Documents That Shaped Humanity

“No one can feel free from danger and destruction until the many torn threads of civilization are bound together again… There can be a happy world… when men create a strong bond towards one another, a bond unbreakable by a studied prejudice or a passing circumstance.” …

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“I Go Down to the Shore”: Natascha McElhone Reads Mary Oliver’s Spare, Splendid Antidote to Melancholy and Personal Misery

Consolation for the waves of sorry from the waves of the sea. …

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The Sun, the Shadow, and the Unselved Self: Helen Macdonald on Eclipses as an Antidote to Ideologies of Otherness and a Portal to Human Connection

“A total eclipse wreaks havoc on your sense of self, on rational individuality.” …

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Life Lessons From The War of Art That Will Change Your Life

Life is chock full of both good and bad experiences. But, when times are hard, it’s, unfortunately, a natural reaction to revert into yourself as you take on the blows that life has dealt you. However, with that said, there is one simple truth that I’ve tried to stand by over the years. Instead of […] …

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The Love of Life in the Face of Death: Keith Haring on Self-Doubt, the Fragility of Being, and Creativity as the Antidote to Our Mortal Anxiety

“It is very important to be in love with life… Life is very fragile and always elusive. As soon as we think we ‘understand,’ there is another mystery. I don’t understand anything. That is, I think, the key to understand everything.” …

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Of Owls and Roses: Mary Oliver on Happiness, Terror, and the Sublime Interconnectedness of Nature

“The world where the owl is endlessly hungry and endlessly on the hunt is the world in which I live too. There is only one world.” …

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The Mountain and the Meaning of Life: René Daumal’s Alpine Allegory of Courage and the Measure of Wisdom

“There is an art to finding your way in the lower regions by the memory of what you have seen when you were higher up. When you can no longer see, you can at least still know.” …

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Artist Maira Kalman Illustrates the Extraordinary Love Story of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas

“This is a love story. You know. How two people, joined together, become themselves.” …

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