This TED Talk features writer Jacqueline Woodson, recorded live at TED 2019.

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A long time ago, there lived a giant, a selfish giant, whose stunning garden was the most

beautiful in all the land.

One evening, this giant came home and found all these children playing in his garden,

and he became enraged.

My own garden is my own garden, the giant said.

And he built his high wall around it.

The author, Oscar Weil, wrote the story of The Selfish Giant in 1888.

Almost a hundred years later, that giant moved into my Brooklyn childhood and never left.

I was raised in a religious family, and I grew up reading both the Bible and the Quran.

The hours of reading both religious and recreational far outnumbered the hours of television watching.

Now, on any given day, you could find my siblings and I curled up in some part of our apartment reading,

sometimes unhappily, because on summer days in New York City, the fire hydrant blasted.

And to our immense jealousy, we could hear our friends down there playing in the gushing water,

their absolute joy making its way up through our open windows.

But I learned that the deeper I went into my books,

the more time I took with each sentence,

...