The Marginalian
Maria Popova
Hello. My name is Maria Popova and The Marginalian is a record of my reading and reckoning with our search for meaning: sometimes through science and philosophy, sometimes through poetry and children’s books, always through the lens of wonder. Founded in 2006 as an email to seven friends under the outgrown name Brain Pickings and since included in the Library of Congress permanent web archive of culturally valuable materials, it remains a one-woman labor of love animated by the ultimate question that binds us all: What is all this?
July 2026
August 2026
September 2026
Top Words
- life
- love
- meaning
- world
- self
- living
- science
- being
- live
- creativity
All posts (505)
“It wouldn’t have been failure to be bankrupt, dishonoured, pilloried, hanged; it was failure not to be anything.” “The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation,” Rebecca Solnit wrote in her exquisite Field Guide to Getting Lost. The...
“Self-hate is really the same thing as sheer egoism, and in the long run breeds the same cruel isolation and despair.” “To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight,” E.E. Cummings told...
“When I die, I want to be sung across the threshold.” A person is a note in the mouth of probability hungry for song, reverberating with echoes of the impossible. To exist at all is as close as this universe of austere laws and inert matter gets to a miracle. At its most miraculous, life has a musical quality,...
Here is the mathematical logic of the spirit: If love is the quality of attention we pay something other than ourselves and hate is the veil of not understanding ourselves, then loving the world more — the other word for which is kindness — is largely a matter of deepening our awareness and sharpening our attention...
To have a strong feeling about anything is to discover something about the poles of your own mind, some potent charge reason can’t touch that electrifies life with an energy you don’t fully understand yet can’t and often don’t want to quell. We learn a great deal about ourselves and the gaps in our self-knowledge...
The astonishing thing is that even though we will never truly know what it is like to be another creature or another person or any configuration of chemistry and chance other than ourselves, we are made of the same matter as the granite that will mark our graves and share 98% of our DNA with the moss that will cover...
Time is the book we fill with the story of our lives. All great storytelling has the shape of music. All music is a shelter in time. In these lives hounded by restlessness, trembling with urgency, we need this shelter, need a place still enough and quiet enough to hear the story of our becoming. Rebecca West...
There are times in life when the continent of certainty parts underfoot and, as the ash cloud of the old world rains darkness upon us, we are asked to swim in the rivers of lava that will make the new. “Almost it would appear that it is useless in such confusion to ask,” wrote Virginia Woolf of such times, “those...
“My foothold is tenon’d and mortis’d in granite… and I know the amplitude of time,” wrote Walt Whitman, knowing what stone teaches about trusting time. It tempers your sorrows to know that the striking red pebble you pick up at the beach is hematite — the oxidation of iron in sedimentary rock, the same iron...
The light was always there — our star is a hundred million years older than our planet — but it was learning to see it, to harness it, to transform it, that made this rocky planet a living world: photoreceptors converting sunlight to sugar to green the Earth, eyes co-evolving with consciousness to give us books and...
Page 44 of 51