Storytelling and the Art of Tenderness: Olga Tokarczuk’s Magnificent Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech

“Tenderness is the most modest form of love. It is the kind of love that does not appear in the scriptures or the gospels, no one swears by it, no one cites it… It appears wherever we take a close and careful look at another being, at something that is not our ‘self.’”

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Nobel Laureate Wisława Szymborska’s Poem “Love at First Sight,” Illustrated

“Every beginning is only a sequel, after all, and the book of events is always open halfway through.”

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A Different Solitude: Pioneering Aviator Beryl Markham on What She Learned About Life in the Bottomless Night

“I learned what every dreaming child needs to know — that no horizon is so far that you cannot get above it or beyond it.”

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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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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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