books

The Great Naturalist John Burroughs on the Art of Noticing and What Artists Can Learn from Naturalists

“We think we have looked at a thing sharply until we are asked for its specific features.” …

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The Soul-Slaking Joy and Body-Poetry of Swimming

In praise of the exquisite instrument that channels “the huge chaos of sensations — sensations of temperature, water, force, light.” …

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The Planter of Modern Life: How a Forgotten Visionary Pioneered Permaculture and Revolutionized Our Relationship with the Land

“Some day… there will come a reckoning. The country will discover… that no nation can exist or have any solidity which ignores the land. But it will cost the country dear.” …

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The Unphotographable #1: A Desert Sunset in the American Southwest

1879 …

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To the Young Who Want to Die: Roxane Gay Reads Gwendolyn Brooks’s Lifeline of a Poem

“The gun will wait. The lake will wait. The tall gall in the small seductive vial will wait will wait.” …

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Seashells and the Spiral of Wonder at the Intersection of Art and Science

“Seashells were money before coin, jewelry before gems, art before canvas… To stare into the spiral top of a whelk or cone shell is to see the swirl of the Milky Way.” …

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This Trivia Test Will Reveal How Big Of A Book Nerd You Are

Do you consider yourself a bit of a book nerd? This quiz will determine just how much you are into your books. It will ask a few questions about some well-known books. See how many you can get right. Take The Book Nerd Quiz Now.  
The post This Trivia Test Will Reveal How Big Of A Book Nerd You Are appeared first on Change your thoughts. …

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Carrots and the Roots of Kindness

A lovely reminder that “kindness and kin have the same mother.” …

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What We Keep in Loss: William Blake’s Stirring Letter to a Bereaved Father

“Our deceased friends are more really with us than when they were apparent to our mortal part.” …

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Games People Play: The Revolutionary 1964 Model of Human Relationships That Changed How We (Mis)Understand Ourselves and Each Other

“Because there is so little opportunity for intimacy in daily life, and because some forms of intimacy (especially if intense) are psychologically impossible for most people, the bulk of the time in serious social life is taken up with playing games.” …

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The Bittersweet Story of the Real-Life Peaceful Bull Who Inspired Munro Leaf and Robert Lawson’s Ferdinand

A journey to the abyss between the real world and the ideal world, and a romp across our mightiest bridge between the two. …

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What Makes Great Art: The Single Most Important Element in Creative Work

“Art is a miracle, superior to the laws.” …

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A Penguin’s Antidote to Abandonment

How to sail in the icy sea of uncertainty without sinking. …

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These 4 Zodiac Signs Love To Read The Most, So Ask Them About Their Favorite Book

Googling “bookstores near me” right now. …

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Improvisation and the Quantum of Consciousness

Inside the brain’s secret portal to remembering the future. …

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June 3, 1947: The Young Jack Kerouac Coins “Beat” While Grieving His Father

“My conscience of life and eternity is not a mistake, or a loneliness, or a foolishness — but a warm dear love of our pour predicament.” …

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The Sea and the Soul: Poet, Painter, and Philosopher Etel Adnan on the Elemental Blues of Being

“For seeing the sea it’s sometimes better to close one’s eyes.” …

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Nature and Creativity: The Science of “Soft Fascination” and How the Natural World Presses the Reset Button of the Brain’s Default Mode Network

“Our everyday experience does not prepare us to assimilate the gaping hugeness of the Grand Canyon or the crashing grandeur of Niagara Falls. We have no response at the ready; our usual frames of reference don’t fit.” …

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Amy Lowell on Legends as a Lens on the Poetic Truth of Our Powers, Limitations, and Endurances

“Legends… are bits of fact, or guesses at fact, pressed into the form of a story and flung out into the world as markers of how much ground has been travelled.” …

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Into the Heart of Life: Richard Powers on Living with Bewilderment at the Otherworldly Wonder of Our World

“That’s the ruling story on this planet. We live suspended between love and ego.” …

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Rebecca Solnit on Writing, Gardening, and the Life of the Mind

“As a writer, you withdraw and disconnect yourself from the world in order to connect to it in the far-reaching way that is other people elsewhere reading the words that came together in this contemplative state.” …

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Iris Murdoch on the Myth of Closure and the Beautiful, Maddening Blind Spots of Our Self-Knowledge

“Judgements on people are never final, they emerge from summings up which at once suggest the need of a reconsideration. Human arrangements are nothing but loose ends and hazy reckoning.” …

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Octavia Butler on the Meaning of God

On change, the measure of intelligence, the courage to take responsibility for our own lives. …

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Artist and Philosopher Rockwell Kent on Our Existential Wanderlust

“Wander where you will over all the world, from every valley seeing forever new hills calling you to climb them, from every mountain top farther peaks enticing you… until you stand one day on the last peak on the border of the interminable sea, stopped by the finality of that.” …

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Barry Lopez on Storytelling and His Advice on the Three Steps to Becoming a Writer

“It is through story that we embrace the great breadth of memory, that we can distinguish what is true, and that we may glimpse, at least occasionally, how to live without despair in the midst of the horror that dogs and unhinges us.” …

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