Tag: quotes

Quote for the Day: August 22nd, 2021

When I chose Strayed for my name, I wasn’t looking at the word’s negative connotations. I was aware at that time in my life that I’d really lost my way, that I’d gone off the path. But the other definitions of that word ‘strayed’ are very powerful too, you know? A stray is somebody who makes, or has to make, his or her own way in the world. A stray is someone who lives without the essential mother and the essential father, which is how I lived. So I was embracing that word, that name, for all of its darkness and all of its light, and I hoped I would keep growing and living into the name, sort of embodying it in my life, you know…It’s like my heritage. I feel it is my real name.

Cheryl Strayed

Quote for the Day: August 21st, 2021

Stand in the center of your own grace.

Alexandra Billings, Actress and Trans Activist, via Instagram

My first encounter with the work of Alexandra Billings was through her role as Davina Rejennae on Amazon’s Transparent. Luminous is too dim a word to describe what she brings to her performances, because it is apparent that she is imbuing each character with the wisdom gleaned from her own lived experience as a trans woman of color.

Today’s quote is taken from a video post Billings made on Instagram a few years ago. Sadly, I didn’t bookmark the exact day but I did write down the quote for posterity because it was too good not to. What exactly, though, does it mean to stand in the center of your own grace? For me, it means that you accept everything that has brought you to the present moment, acknowledging that what you’ve been through has made you into the person you are. It also means that you absolve yourself of blame, and its fugly cousin shame, for what you’ve done to survive. It means that you are cognizant of the fact that you are here because of what you’ve been through, not despite what you’ve been through, and you do not owe the world an explanation or an apology for taking up space.

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

Poem for the Day: August 20th, 2021

Never by Stephen Dobyns 

The day I learned my wife was dying 
I went to read about volcanic eruptions,
earthquakes, fire, bloody war, and murder. 
I wanted to discover the most awful, because 

I knew her death would be worse than that;
and even crueler would be her absence, not 
for a day or a year. It meant not coming back.
That was what I couldn’t imagine. How many 

days in Never? How many times would we 
hear a car and think, That’s her, or hear 
the phone ring and feel suddenly happy, 
only to grasp it was basically nobody, 

and each burst of knowing would be one 
little death, and they will happen all day.

Poem for the Day: August 19th, 2021

It Goes Away by Linda Gregg 

I give everything away and it goes away, 
into the dusty air, 
onto the face of the water 
that goes away beyond our seeing. 
I give everything away 
that has been given to me: 
the voices of children under clouds, 
the men in the parks at the chess tables, 
the women entering and leaving bakeries. 
God who came here by rock, by tree, by bird. 
All things silent in my seeing. 
All things believable in their leaving. 
Everything I have I give away 
and it goes away.

Poem for the Day: August 18th, 2021

Poem Beginning With a Retweet by Maggie Smith 

If you drive past horses and don’t say horses
you’re a psychopath. If you see an airplane 
but don’t point it out. A rainbow,
a cardinal, a butterfly. If you don’t 
whisper-shout albino squirrel! Deer! 
Red fox! If you hear a woodpecker 
and don’t shush everyone around you 
into silence. If you find an unbroken 
sand dollar in a tide pool. If you see 
a dorsal fun breaking the water. 
If you see the moon and don’t say 
oh my god look at the moon. If you smell 
smoke and don’t search for fire. 
If you feel yourself receding, receding,
and don’t tell anyone until you’re gone.

Poem for the Day: August 17th, 2021

I Was Minor by Olena Kalytiak Davis

Today’s poem is one of my favorites. I hope you love it as much as I do. 

In this life,
I was very minor.

I was a minor lover.
There was maybe a day, a night
or two, when I was on.

I was, would have been,
a minor daughter,
had my parents lived.

I was a minor runner. I was
a minor thinker. In the middle
distance, not too fast.

I was a minor mother: only
two, and sometimes,
I was mean to them.

I was a minor beauty.
I was a minor Buddhist.
There was a certain symmetry, but
it, too, was minor.

My poems were not major
enough to even make me
a “minor poet,”

but I did sit here
instead of getting up, getting
the gun, loading it.

Counting,
killing myself.

Copyright © 2016 Olena Kalytiak Davis. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 31, 2016, by the Academy of American Poets.

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