Prashanthini Mande

“Maybe it's because we could pass along science. You wrote a fact in a book and there it sat until someone born five hundred years later improved it. Refined it, implemented it more usefully. Easy. You couldn't do that with soul-learning. We all started from zero. From less than zero, actually. We started whiny, without grace. Obsessed only with our own needing. And the dead couldn't teach us anything about that. No facts or tables or proofs. You just had to live and suffer and then teach our kids to do the same.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

“He wanted to be on "the right side of history," whatever that was. But more than that (he admitted this to himself when he was practicing being rigorously honest), he wanted other people to perceive him as someone who cares about being on the right side of history. Its's hard to imagine an earth martyr who was also a fervent eugenicist, or one who had supported Mussolini. Being on the right side of history seemed a bedrock feature of the sort of people in whom he was interested.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

“Soon he will walk and then he will run and the hand that pulls on the hand of the mother is the hand that will pull to let go.”
― Paul Lynch, Prophet Song

“Nobody was ever really watching, except Phoebe. Phoebe was the only person waiting in the dark to condemn herself for every single thing when the day was over.”
― Alison Espach, The Wedding People