1 - 7 December 2024 QOTW

quotes from books thru December

Image description: an open book on a wooden desk with blurred setss of shelves in the background.

For the month of December, I plan to cite from books on my physical and digital bookshelves. This week’s quotes come from books on my to-be-read shelves.

Sunday

Eighty percent of the human body is made of water, so it isn’t surprising that one sees

a different face in the mirror each morning.

Yoko Tawada, Where Europe Begins, Stories, translated from the Japanese by Yumi Selden & quoted

in Personal Attention Roleplay by H. Felix Chau Bradley

Monday

Am I / what love? Is this the glittering world/I’ve been begging for?

Natalie Diaz, Postcolonial Love Poem as quoted in Love After the End, an anthology of Two-spirit & Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction edited by Joshua Whitehead

Tuesday

Make your heart too rebellious for patriarchy to plant itself within you. Make your mind too free for fascism to chain your imagination.

Mona Eltahawy, The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls

Wednesday

Sometimes I am embarrassed by my ancestral language, sometimes I like to indulge in the deep nostalgia that flows from my awareness of its presence. Most of the time, though, it’s just there, a part of me I don’t know what to do with. A ghost limb reaching back through time, trying to hold on to a place I’ve never been. (67)

from Kai Cheng Thom’s essay, Language is the Fluid of Our Collective Bodies in “tongues – on longing and belonging through language,” edited by Eufemia Fantetti, Leonarda Carrington and Ayelet Tssabari

Thursday

info on (more: trees)

Imagine automatically planting a tree every time you received an online order, booked a taxi, attended an online meeting, went for a run or simply turned the heating up.

Zoë Brigley, in Footprints: an anthology of new ecopoetry, edited by Charlie Baylis and Aaron Kent

Friday

She said it from the get-go, when in the beginning was the word, when the very first words existed, the first she hearkened to in her life. Cruel precious revelations, gospel truths, migraine inducing, inaugural gift of the wicked faerie godmother magically brewed by faerie fingers ladyfingers: five words, five, like poison in the ear, like fledglings of misfortune, ponderous, prophetic, oracular, snake oil liniment and the whole kit and caboodle, and in her black heart a future spindle sharpened.

from The Faerie Devouring by Catherine Lalonde, translated by Oana Avasilichioaie

Saturday

You have the right to glow./It’s not your duty/to light up anyone else’s day.

Rosie Garland, Letter of rejection from a Black Hole in What Girls do in the Dark

If you have inspiring and intriguing quotes to share, please reach out. I’d love to include them here.

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