Quote for the Day: November 7th, 2021

Choose, everyday to forgive yourself. You are human, flawed, and most of all worthy of love.
Alison Malee

Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please like, comment, follow, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at fred.slusher@thevoraciousbibliophile.com or catch me on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.

Quote for the Day: November 6th, 2021

You don’t have to move mountains. Simply fall in love with life. Be a tornado of happiness, gratitude and acceptance. You will change the world just by being a warm, kind hearted human being.
Anita Krizzan

Poem for the Day: November 4th, 2021

A Thousand Vowels by Shuri Kido Translated from the Japanese by Tomoyuki Endo & Forrest Gander

A long slope.
The strong sun dipped, and finally sank.
No matter how long I walked, I stayed in "the middle of the road."
The name torn into pieces.
Just keeping on, climbing higher and higher,
I'd completely forgotten the name.
The west wind shifts the typhoon's course,
the world, for a few hours, is thrown into confusion.
You might name one thing after another,
but each loses its name in that same moment.
Into what we call "nature."
I stood in the middle of nature.
And something was missing, the natural was
draped in a thin shroud.
Vowels scattered,
the name went missing.
When once more the name "nature" was applied
to the desolate-as-ever landscape,
immediately, the name began to weather away.
What is still losing its name,
and what has already lost its name,
those two strands entwine
around the true name.
Those who have wings stay put,
howling out their condition over and over,
"How fragile we are!"
though no one hears them.
Thousands of ripples tell
a story of benthic anguish.
The ripples beach themselves
on the name of each anguish,
vowels scatter by the thousands
over the earth.

Poem for the Day: November 2nd, 2021

Women by Alice Walker

They were women then 
My mama’s generation 
Husky of voice—stout of 
Step 
With fists as well as 
Hands 
How they battered down 
Doors 
And ironed 
Starched white 
Shirts 
How they led 
Armies
Headragged generals 
Across mined 
Fields 
Booby-trapped 
Ditches 
To discover books 
Desks 
A place for us 
How they knew what we 
Must know 
Without knowing a page 
Of it 
Themselves.

© Alice Walker. Alice Walker is one of the preeminent American writers of her generation. She is a novelist, short story writer, essayist, poet, and activist whose work, while critically-acclaimed and highly-lauded by members of the literary intelligentsia, far surpasses any words which mere mortals may bestow upon it. For her 1982 novel The Color Purple, Walker won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The Steven Spielberg-directed film adaptation was nominated for 11 Academy Awards, and if you’re asking me, the fact that it didn’t win in any category is one of the biggest snubs in Oscars history.

I first read “Women” as a high school freshman, memorizing and reciting it for extra credit. Later on, it grew in significance for me when I read Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston and learned that if not for Alice Walker, Hurston’s great body of work would probably have languished in obscurity for all time. Walker’s acknowledgment of the labor of her Black women foremothers in making her own life possible is a major theme throughout her body of work, and nowhere is it clearer than in today’s poem.

Quote for the Day: November 2nd, 2021

*Because of Winn-Dixie* *(Anniversary* *Edition)* by Kate DiCamillo and Ann Patchett (Introduction)

There ain’t no way you can hold onto something that wants to go, you understand? You can only love what you got while you got it.
Kate DiCamillo, Because of Winn-Dixie

Quote for the Day: November 1st, 2021

Give of yourself of both hands and overflowing heart, but give only the excess after you have lived your own life.
Maybelle Stephens Mitchell, American suffragist, activist, and mother to Pulitzer Prize-winning author Margaret Mitchell, in a letter dictated to her daughter while on her deathbed

Poem for the Day: October 30th, 2021

go to the movies & see a rom-com by yourself. go to your favorite restaurant & request a table for one. go to a café & order a coffee & a pastry for yourself. lie in the grass & cloudgaze without holding someone else’s hand while you do it. we need to stop seeing these things as pathetic. you are the only person you have to be with every day, so why shouldn’t you find ways to appreciate you? 

—keep falling in love with yourself.

Today’s poem is from shine your icy crown by amanda lovelace. She is the author of several bestselling poetry collections, among them the titles in the “women are some kind of magic” series, the “you are your own fairy tale” trilogy, and the “things that h(a)unt” duology. shine your icy crown was published in January 2021 by Andrews McMeel Publishing and is available to purchase wherever books are sold.

Poem for the Day: October 29th, 2021

when we empower ourselves, we inspire others to empower 
themselves. step up & lead the way for others to follow in your 
footsteps. encourage them to do better than you were able to, 
because hope can never be lost as long as the future rests in 
the hands of our sisters & siblings. 

—be the light.

Quote for the Day: October 29th, 2021

Inner peace begins the moment you choose not to allow another person or event to control your emotions.
Pema Chödrön

Quote for the Day: October 27th, 2021

We only have what we give.
Isabel Allende

Tag: inspirational