Reads by Maria Popova
I Am Loved: Nikki Giovanni’s Poems for Kids, Selected and Illustrated by Beloved Nonagenarian Artist Ashley Bryan
A vibrant ode to the inherent poetry of existence.
Ursula K. Le Guin on Art, Storytelling, and the Power of Language to Transform and Redeem
“One of the functions of art is to give people the words to know their own experience… Storytelling is a tool for knowing who we are and what we want.”
Ursula K. Le Guin on Busyness and the Creative Life
In praise of the mundane, unquantifiable, impractical activities that feed creative work and fill life with meaning.
If Apples Had Teeth: Shirley and Milton Glaser’s Lovely Vintage Children’s Book About Questioning the Way Things Are
An irreverent invitation to reconsider the world’s givens.
T.S. Eliot on Writing: His Warm and Wry Letter of Advice to a Sixteen-Year-Old Girl Aspiring to Become a Writer
“Don’t write at first for anyone but yourself.”
Nobel-Winning Physicist Niels Bohr on Subjective vs. Objective Reality and the Uses of Religion in a Secular World
“The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer. But that does not mean that it is not a genuine reality. And splitting this reality into an objective and a subjective side won’t get us very far.”
“A Wrinkle in Time” Author Madeleine L’Engle on Self-Consciousness and the Wellspring of Creativity
“When we can play with the unself-conscious concentration of a child, this is: art: prayer: love.”
Walt Whitman on the Splendor of Winter Beaches and How Art Imbues Life’s Bleakest Moments with Beauty
“This winter day — grim, yet so delicate-looking, so spiritual — striking emotional, impalpable depths, subtler than all the poems, paintings, music…”
Writing and the Threshold Life: Jane Hirshfield on How the Liminal Liberates Us from the Prison of the Self
“The creative self [asks] the surrender of ordinary conceptions of identity and will for a broader kind of intimacy and allegiance.”
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