Kir > Kir's Quotes

“The streets you walk, the food you eat, the job you work, the method of transportation you choose, the beauty products you purchase, the shows you watch, the links you click, the way you sit on a train, the way your speak to waiters, the way you take your coffee -- everything affects everyone. Find a way to believe this, even when sober.”
― Tess Gunty, The Rabbit Hutch

“On the opposite end of the sidewalk, a large woman in her sixties collapsed. Immediately, two people rushed to the woman's side, gingerly tending to her, touching her shoulders and face, speaking to her as though she were their mother—a cherished one—and Joan understood that human tenderness was not to be mocked. It was the last real thing.”
― Tess Gunty, The Rabbit Hutch

“Her limbs function, and she finds this miraculous when she dwells on it. In fact, she finds plenty of things miraculous. Forcefully, she summons her best memories. That time on a red-eye bus when the driver used the intercom to contemplate, in campfire baritone, the wonder of his grandchildren, the way they validated his life as time well spent. As he lulled the passengers with stories, someone began to pass around a Tupperware of sliced watermelon, and a drunk man offered to share the miniature bottles of whiskey from his bag, and Joan felt such overwhelming affection for her species, she feared she would sacrifice herself to save it.

A bad summer storm. Green sky, tornado warning, violent winds. Joan was downtown, leaving work early, briskly walking toward the parking garage where her station wagon waited. On the opposite end of the sidewalk, a large woman in her sixties collapsed. Immediately, two people rushed to the woman's side, gingerly tending to her, touching her shoulders and face, speaking to her as though she were their mother -- a cherished one -- and Joan understood that human tenderness was not to be mocked. It was the last real thing.

Dining alone on a blustery Easter night at the only Chinese restaurant in town. When she asked for the check, the waiter said, "It just started to rain. You're welcome to stay a little longer, if you want." Miraculous. Joan recalls the existence of dogs, craft stores, painkillers, the public library. Cream ribboning through coffee. The scent of the lilacs near her childhood home. Brown sugar on a summer strawberry. Her father's recovery from the tyranny of multigenerational alcoholism. The imperfect but true repossession of his life. The euphoria of the first warmth after winter, the first easy breath after a cold, the return of one's appetite after an anxiety attack. Joan has much to be happy about. She thinks: I am happy, you are happy, we are happy. These thoughts -- how she can force herself to have them. Miraculous.”
― Tess Gunty, The Rabbit Hutch

“The mystery of life isn't a problem to solve, but a reality to experience.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never consistent. It depends in part upon the myth-making imagination of humankind. The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him. And he must have a strong sense of the sardonic. This is what uncouples him from belief in his own pretensions. The sardonic is all that permits him to move within himself. Without this quality, even occasional greatness will destroy a man.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“Much that was called religion has carried an unconscious attitude of hostility toward life. True religion must teach that life is filled with joys pleasing to the eye of God, that knowledge without action is empty. All men must see that the teaching of religion by rules and rote is largely a hoax. The proper teaching is recognized with ease. You can know it without fail because it awakens within you that sensation which tells you this is something you’ve always known.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“I see us giving love to each other in a time of quiet between storms. It's what we were meant to do.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“It's hard to tell the difference between sea and sky, between voyager and sea. Between reality and the workings of the heart.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“Your heart is like a great river after a long spell of rain, spilling over its banks. All signposts that once stood on the ground are gone, inundated and carried away by that rush of water. And still the rain beats down on the surface of the river. Every time you see a flood like that on the news you tell yourself: That’s it. That’s my heart.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“A strange, terrific force unlike anything I've ever experienced is sprouting in my heart, taking root there, growing. Shut up behind my rib cage, my warm heart expands and contracts independent of my will--over and over.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“In traveling, a companion, in life, compassion,'" she repeats, making sure of it. If she had paper and pencil, it wouldn't surprise me if she wrote it down. "So what does that really mean? In simple terms."
I think it over. It takes me a while to gather my thoughts, but she waits patiently.
"I think it means," I say, "that chance encounters are what keep us going. In simple terms.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“Eight of the ten commandments are about what thou shalt not. But you can live a whole life not doing any of that stuff and still avoid doing any good. That’s the whole crisis. The rot at the root of everything. The belief that goodness is built on a constructed absence, not-doing. That belief corrupts everything, has everyone with any power sitting on their hands.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

“Love was a room that appeared when you stepped into it.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

“There’s this story I read one time, some old-school Muslim fairy tale, maybe it was a discarded hadith I guess, but it was all about the first time Satan sees Adam. Satan circles around him, inspecting him like a used car or something, this new creation—God’s favorite, apparently. Satan’s unimpressed, doesn’t get it. And then Satan steps into Adam’s mouth, disappears completely inside him and passes through all his guts and intestines and finally emerges out his anus. And when he gets out, Satan’s laughing and laughing. Rolling around. He passes all the way through the first man and he’s rolling around laughing, in tears, and he says to God, ‘This is what you’ve made? He’s all empty! All hollow!’ He can’t believe his luck. How easy his job is going to be. Humans are just a long emptiness waiting to be filled.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

“Behind me is silence, and ahead of me is silence.’ And that was it. That was her whole answer. Isn’t that perfect?” “Yeah, that’s beautiful,” said Cyrus, though it confused him. “What I mean is, I think maybe you’ll find your real ending once you stop looking for it,” Orkideh said. “I think real endings tend to work their way in from the outside.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

“We won't grow old together, Cyrus. But can't you feel this mattering? Right now?”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

“The story pretends to be about names but it’s actually a story about time, how time flattens everything. Family, duty, whatever. Into dirt. There’s something comforting about that, something vast and, yes, inescapable. Like bright ink spilling over everyone at once.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

“Cyrus, for months, every song I've listened to has been directly about me. About my life. And my stupid fucking life with you. Every flower has been blooming straight into my fucking face. Do you know what that is? It's like being insane. Like the fucking pigeons are speaking to me. Have you ever felt that? Do you have any idea what I'm even talking about?”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

“This is what time travel is. It’s looking at a person, and seeing them in the present and the past, concurrently. And that mode of transport only worked with those one had known a significant time.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“To allow yourself to play with another person is no small risk. It means allowing yourself to be open, to be exposed, to be hurt. It is the human equivalent of the dog rolling on its back---I know you won't hurt me, even though you can. It is the dog putting its mouth around your hand and never biting down. To play requires trust and love. Many years later, as Sam would controversially say in an interview with the gaming website Kotaku, "There is no more intimate act than play, even sex." The internet responded: no one who had had good sex would ever say that, and there must be something seriously wrong with Sam.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“word for this: sonder. “The realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.” Incredible, how naming something took nothing away from its stagger. Language could be totally impotent like that.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

“Leila sat up too, scooted closer to me, still on her knees. She grabbed the middle finger of my right hand and, shutting her left eye, held my finger gently but firmly on top of her closed eyelid.
“Do you feel this?” she said, moving her open eye up, down, up, down.
Beneath the eyelid beneath my finger, her
other eye was matching the movements of its sibling. “You feel how even the closed eye is still searching for your face?”
I nodded. Her hand tapped, pum PO-POP pum, pum POP-POP pum.
“That,” Leila said, “is how I have been searching for you.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

“Then imagine,” Kareem said, “that a bunch of people who’d never met you, for whom you’re just a myth, began sending you the art you loved, or the art they loved, the art they thought you might love too. An old woman sending a bunch of old standards. Or an eight-year-old boy sending you his prized Monkees record. Imagine how that might contribute to your sense of amongness. To your sense of earth maybe actually being the right place for you.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!