evelyn

“The performance of certainty seemed to be at the root of so much grief. Everyone in America seemed to be afraid and hurting and angry, starving for a fight they could win. And more than that even, they seemed certain their natural state was to be happy, contented, and rich. The genesis of everyone's pain had to be external, such was their certainty.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

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

“But do you really think that you were worthy of the love I was showing you then, or for a single moment I thought you were? Do you really think that for a single period in our friendship you were worthy of the love I showed you, or for a single moment I thought you were? I knew that you were not. But Love does not traffic in a marketplace, nor use a huckster's scales. Its joy, like the joy of the intellect, is to feel itself alive. The aim of Love is to love: no more, and no less. You were my enemy: such an enemy as no man ever had. I had given you my life, and to gratify the lowest and most contemptible of all human passions, Hatred and Vanity and Greed, you had thrown it away.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“Only in a culture that privileged infallibility above all else could a man like President Invective rise to power—a man insulated since birth from any sense of accountability, raised in a pristine cocoon of inherited wealth to emerge pristine, dewy, wholly unsullied by those irksome mortal foibles, grief and doubt.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!