culture

“The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” Elizabeth Bishop wrote in one of the great masterpieces of poetry. “Every […]

By Maria Popova “One can never be alone enough to write,” Susan Sontag lamented in her diary. “Oh comforting solitude,

“An honorable human relationship… in which two people have the right to use the word ‘love,’” Adrienne Rich wrote, “is

Not long after writing about the bowerbird’s enchantment in blue, I walked out of my house and gasped at the

There are moments in life when we are reminded that we are unfinished, that the story we have been telling

Language is an instrument of great precision and poignancy — our best tool for telling each other what the world

“For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks… the work for

By Maria Popova I turned the corner one afternoon to find my neighborhood grocer gone. No warning, just gone —

“In the middle of the journey of our life I found myself within a dark woods where the straight way