Quote for the Day: February 15th, 2022

Lots of people want to ride with you in the limo, but what you want is someone who will take the bus with you when the limo breaks down.
Oprah Winfrey

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: February 14th, 2022

Where there is great love, there are always miracles.
Willa Cather

Poem for the Day: February 13th, 2022

Domestic Violence by Iliana Rocha

Morning dragonflies tricked by the sliding glass
door, scattered on the porch like cigarettes torn in half,
& a horse in watercolor, its joints light blue circles.
Golf carts zoom over the green breasts
of the hills. I slept on my hands,
flat pillows filled with a puzzle of tiny bones. Loneliness’s

gray blanket, last night’s mascara, loneliness—
a dragonfly hovers like spit in slow motion near the glass,
promises to fill the pane with itself like his hand,
my face reflecting back at him. Half
the world is still asleep, my breasts
alive & waking from my shirt. Wind in circles

through grass, horses tip in its direction. Saturated circles,
faces, move the muted TV screen, broadcast more loneliness:
buy this property, try this exercise. A woman with hard breasts
isn’t convincing. When I shift in myself, glass
breaks inside me, a sky losing over half
its stars, desperate dark hands

finding something else to fill it. Like hands,
birds clap their wings in desperation’s applause, circling
as if their species is dying out. My throat, half
gastrolith, half swollen tequila, it’s not loneliness
we flying things try to avoid, but in glass
a painful logic, one you learn like the breast’s.

A rainbow interrupts the white cloud breasts,
like mine, where once his hands
lived, then destroyed. My breath against silence’s smooth glass,
longing for the wisdom of a tree’s hollow, sex circle,
how it endures loneliness
by invitations to other survivors of this world from half

its violence, all its love.

Iliana Rocha earned her Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from Western Michigan University. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Her debut collection of poetry, Karankawa, won the 2014 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry. You can read more about Iliana Rocha and her work on her website.

Quote for the Day: February 13th, 2022

*On the Road: 50th Anniversary Edition* by Jack Kerouac

[…]the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Aww!’
Jack Kerouac, On the Road: 50th Anniversary Edition

Quote for the Day: February 12th, 2022

Recovering from suffering is not like recovering from a disease. Many people don’t come out healed; they come out different.
David Brooks, The Road to Character

Quote for the Day: February 11th, 2022

*Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption* by Bryan Stevenson

Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.
Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption

Quote for the Day: February 9th, 2022

*The Light Between Oceans: A Novel* by M.L. Stedman

You only have to forgive once. To resent, you have to do it all day, every day.
M.L. Stedman, The Light Between Oceans: A Novel

Quote for the Day: February 5th, 2022

*But What If We’re Wrong?: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past* by Chuck Klosterman

The ultimate failure of the United States…will likely derive from our uncompromising belief in the things we consider unimpeachable and idealized and beautiful.
Chuck Klosterman, But What If We’re Wrong?: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past

Quote for the Day: February 4th, 2022

*Thinking, Fast and Slow* by Daniel Kahneman

Nothing in life is as important as you think it is, while you are thinking about it.
Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

Quote for the Day: February 2nd, 2022

*Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books* by Azar Nafisi

The worst crime committed by totalitarian mindsets is that they force their citizens, including their victims, to become complicit in their crimes. Dancing with your jailer, participating in your own execution, that is an act of utmost brutality.
Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

I’ve been listening to Azar Nafisi’s memoir which today’s quote comes from on audiobook, and I think it’s a timely read considering all the attempts at censorship which are taking place in the United States right now. For example, Gene McGee, the mayor of Ridgeland, Mississippi, is withholding $110,000 in funding from the Madison County Library System until such time as they remove all LGBTQ+-affirming content from their shelves. His personal religious beliefs are being used as the arbiter for the distribution of public tax monies, which is reprehensible. The matter is being brought before the city’s board of alderman, which will make the final decision. You can read more about the Madison County Library System’s fight to keep diverse content available to the community here.

His [McGee’s] personal religious beliefs are being used as the arbiter for the distribution of public tax monies, which is reprehensible.

On January 10th, just 17 days before Holocaust Remembrance Day, the school board of McMinn County, Tennessee voted to have Maus, Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel about the Holocaust, removed from the 8th-grade curriculum. In a statement released by the school board, they said the book was removed on the grounds “of its unnecessary use of profanity and nudity and its depiction of violence and suicide.” Art Spiegelman’s parents were survivors of the Auschwitz extermination camp, where 1.1 million people were murdered; nearly a million of the people murdered were Jews. Spiegelman’s mother later died by suicide. What do these adults expect? Shall the Holocaust be sanitized to accommodate their puritanical squeamishness? How is reading Maus any more traumatizing than the active shooter drills these children must endure?

Shall the Holocaust be sanitized to accommodate their puritanical squeamishness?

There are more examples of attempts at censorship sweeping the country. Just googling the word “censorship” will bring you up dozens of results, most of which are from incidents occurring in the past couple of years. The books which these people want to limit or remove access to are books which tell the truth about the world and about its history, a history which closely mirrors our present reality. What is that reality? A world in which the horrors of the past are silenced while the suffering of the marginalized is ignored in the present. And the world turns on: business-as-usual.

The books which these people want to limit or remove access to are books which tell the truth about the world and about its history, a history which closely mirrors our present reality.

It is important that we talk about the ideas, themes, and events in these books. It is important for our children to have access to narratives (historical and contemporary) about people with lived experiences divergent from their own. It is important that we say no every time someone tries to distort, sanitize, or artificially alter the reality of the past or the present. Our future depends on it.

It is important for our children to have access to narratives (historical and contemporary) about people with lived experiences divergent from their own.

World War II wasn’t that long ago. The concentration camps of the Nazis are not that long shut down. Anti-Jewish crimes are on the rise. Black people are still being murdered by police. We cannot afford to be silent.

References

Ridgeland Mayor Demands LGBTQ+ Book Purge, Threatens Library Funding by Nick Judin, published online by Mississippi Free Press on January 25th, 2022

School Board in Tennessee Bans Teaching of Holocaust Novel ‘Maus’ by Jenny Gross, published online by The New York Times on January 27th, 2022

Auschwitz: How death camp became centre of Nazi Holocaust by BBC News, published online on January 23rd, 2020