#Annie Dillard

Author: Maria Popova / Source: Brain Pickings “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,” Annie Dillard wrote in her abiding insistence on choosing presence over productivity. But how do we really spend our days? In our era, the average human lifetime will contain two years of

Author: Maria Popova / Source: Brain Pickings “Time and reason are functions of each other,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her philosophical novel exploring why honoring the continuity of past and future is the wellspring of moral action. The human animal is indeed a temporal creature, our

Author: Maria Popova / Source: Brain Pickings “I am grateful, not in order that my neighbour, provoked by the earlier act of kindness, may be more ready to benefit me, but simply in order that I may perform a most pleasant and beautiful act.” “Anything you do not give freely and abundantly

Author: Maria Popova / Source: Brain Pickings “We, this people, on this small and drifting planet,” Maya Angelou wrote in her cosmic clarion call to humanity, “Whose hands can strike with such abandon / That in a twinkling, life is sapped from the living / Yet those same hands can touch with such

Author: Maria Popova / Source: Brain Pickings Two weeks after my fifteenth birthday, an otherworldly wave of darkness intercepted the sweltering August afternoon and plunged it into a surreal cool — the first total solar eclipse to sweep across Bulgaria since I was a small child. An hour earlier,