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Volta Place @voltaplacereads.bsky.social · Sep 3

I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest…

Sylvia Plath
The Bell Jar
1963

#booksky #pocketmirror #ghostship

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Volta Place @voltaplacereads.bsky.social · Aug 20

“A safe fairyland is untrue to all worlds.”

JRR Tolkien
The Hobbit
1937

So make friends with danger (or chili spiced sipping chocolate)

#booksky #newmexico #sippingchocolate #newmexicohumanities #humanities #fairies #fairyland #pueblo #chilis #cacao #mesoamerica #Oaxaca #porcelain #cocoa #read

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Volta Place @voltaplacereads.bsky.social · Aug 12

Like it or not, pregnancy has a plot, a story.

Jazmina Barrera
Linea Nigra
2022

#booksky #bookcover #ThreeActPlay #spanishliterature #childbearing #earthquakes #eclipses #lactation #LowieHollowell #CreativeLabor #memoir #manifesto

3

Volta Place @voltaplacereads.bsky.social · Jul 28

If change is to come, it will have to come from the margins.

Wendell Berry
The Unsettling of America
1977

#booksky #culture #agriculture #environmentalism #climatecrisis #labor #pastoral

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Volta Place @voltaplacereads.bsky.social · Jul 26

The sky isn’t more beautiful if you have perfect skin. Music doesn’t sound more interesting if you have a six-pack. Dogs aren’t better company if you’re famous. P izza tastes good regardless of your job title.

Matt Haig
The Comfort Book
2021

#PeanutButterToast #booksky #hope #depression #marmalade

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Volta Place @voltaplacereads.bsky.social · Jul 22

The lover's fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.

Fragments d’un discours amoureux
(A Lover's Discourse)
Roland Barthes
1977

#YourLoveIsMyDrug #booksky #readingsky #FrenchTheory #FatalAttraction

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Volta Place @voltaplacereads.bsky.social · Jun 8

As always, an educated woman was a dangerous woman.

Stacy Schiff
Cleopatra: A Life
2010

#booksky #empress #pharaoh #thepastisfemale #egypt #africa #romanempire #reading #readingisresistance

4

Volta Place @voltaplacereads.bsky.social · Jun 6

The quality you most admire in a man? Courage moral and physical: 'anima'—the ability to think like a woman. Also a sense of the absurd.

Christopher Hitchens
Hitch-22
2010

#booksky #anima #absurd #womenaretooemotional #journalist

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Volta Place @voltaplacereads.bsky.social · May 28

There on the horse rode Power, through the gateway of triumphal entries, with dazzling features, but graven as in stone. The Power which transcends us and whose hooves we kiss.

Heinrich Mann
The Loyal Subject/Man of Straw
1918

#booksky #militarism #commercialism #germany #corruptsociety #reading

5

Volta Place @voltaplacereads.bsky.social · May 19

It is all a dream—a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought—a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!

Mark Twain
The Mysterious Stranger
1908

#booksky #existentialcrisis #existentialism #satan

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Volta Place @voltaplacereads.bsky.social · May 17

Flowers, by themselves, fall.
Water too runs alone.

One shared longing,
Parted between two.

Unrelenting, it falls
from the brows, only to rise
in the heart.

Li Qingzhao
Trans. Wendy Chen
The Magpie at Night
2025

#booksky #poetryintranslation #songdynasty #chineseliterature #chinesepoetry #poem

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Volta Place @voltaplacereads.bsky.social · May 12

“I identify always with Aeneas, the Trojan refugee who desperately tries to fulfill his destiny in a world that holds no place for him.”

Marie Benedict
Victoria Christopher Murray
The Personal Librarian
2021

#booksky #passing #segregation #libraryofcongress #blacklibrarian #manuscript #civilrights

3

Volta Place @voltaplacereads.bsky.social · May 5

They move the cafe out to the back so anyone who wants a drink or a snack has to traipse all the way through the store. And naturally, on their way there—human nature being what it is—they’ll pick up a little something extra.

Nicola Barker
Darkmans
2007

#consumerism #booksky #manbooker #shortlist

5

Volta Place @voltaplacereads.bsky.social · Apr 25

Blood flowed in Bluebeard’s house,—in the slaughterhouses,—in the amphitheaters, where God’s seal turned the windows livid. Blood and milk flowed.

John Ashbery translating Arthur #Rimbaud
Illuminations
2011

#poetryintranslation #booksky #poetrymonth #prosepoem #poetsky #reading #resistance

3

Volta Place @voltaplacereads.bsky.social · Apr 22

There are no reasons. She is obliged to be who she is. We all are. Reasons are in books.

Philip Roth
American Pastoral
1998

#booksky #pulitzerprize #pulitzer #america #americandream #1968 #reading #readingisresistance

4

Volta Place @voltaplacereads.bsky.social · Apr 16

If you are alive, there is hope for a better day and something good to happen. If there is nothing good left in the destiny of a person, he or she will die.

Ishmael Beah
A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier
1997

#booksky #childhood #resilience #sierraleone #reading #humanrights #resistance

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Volta Place @voltaplacereads.bsky.social · Apr 14

…tightening the rope until there was no more resistance. So that’s what it was to kill.

Pilar Quintana
The Bitch
2017

#booksky #dogs #colombia #motherhood #love #violence #perimenopause #menopause #BibliotecaDeNarrativaPrize #translation #shelterdog #puppy #pacific #reading #spanish #literature

5

Volta Place @voltaplacereads.bsky.social · Apr 10

Everyone at some point in their lives should have a long great love affair with a magnificent lunatic.

Lorrie Moore
I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home
2023

#booksky #death #meditation #reality #grief #grieving #haunted #ghoststory #ghosts #novelsky #bronx #reading #readingisresistance #thepast

4

Volta Place @voltaplacereads.bsky.social · Apr 8

So self-acceptance does not mean self-admiration or even self-liking at every moment of our lives, but tolerance for all our emotions, including those that make us feel uncomfortable.

Gabor Maté
Scattered Minds
1999

#booksky #adhd #audhd #attentiondeficit #uncomfortablefeelings #selftolerance

3

Volta Place @voltaplacereads.bsky.social · Apr 6

I see the long years of our marriage ahead like a great spacious welcoming firelit room…I want to show you off. I want to wave you around in pride.

According to Mark
Penelope Lively
1984

#booksky #love #affair #romance #bookerprize #biography #biographer #england #mystery #reading #pride #lovewins

3

Volta Place @voltaplacereads.bsky.social · Apr 3

Poetry’s fundamental figure, metaphor—opportunistic and changeable as DNA—roots itself in error and the grubbiness of language, relying less on likeness than the gap failure opens.

Katherine Coles
The Stranger I Become
2021

#booksky #poetrysky #walking #looking #writing #metaphor #retinas #poem

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Volta Place @voltaplacereads.bsky.social · Mar 31

Love this cover so much

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Volta Place @voltaplacereads.bsky.social · Mar 31

“If you’re a frustrated interior decorator, sewing for your home is the answer to your problems.”

Needlecraft for the Home
1952

#booksky #vintage #crochet #needlepoint #knitting #fabricart #textileart #woobles #embroidery #interiordecoration #interiordesign #softlife #homemaking #nesting #reading

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Volta Place @voltaplacereads.bsky.social · Mar 27

"It's a wonderful effect," speaking then as she gently touched the blouse-front, a net of sheen grey fainter than pearl, a dove-down diaphanous grey, fashioned, as it were, to hold in a web of insinuation that treasure next of lace..."

Terry Southern
Flash and Filigree
1958

#booksky #beatnik #beat

5

Volta Place @voltaplacereads.bsky.social · Mar 24

Use the talents you possess, for the woods would be very silent if no birds sang except the best.

Henry van Dyke
The Ruling Passion
1901

#booksky #bookcover #coverart
#victorian #canadian #frenchcanadian #shortstory #moral #anecdote #reading #rural #resistance #buyused #buybooks #read #blossoms

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