brooke b

“What distinguishes grace from everything else? Grace is unearned. If you’ve moved through the world in such a way as to feel you’ve earned cosmic compensation, then what you’ve earned is something more like justice, like propriety. Not grace. Propriety is correct. Justice is just. There’s an inescapable transactional quality: perform x good, receive y reward. Grace doesn’t work that way. It begins with the reward. Goodness never enters the equation.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

“The leaves crisping at their edges. Here is a season Hamnet has not known or touched. Here is a world moving on without him.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, Hamnet

“It feels so American to discount dreams because they're not built of objects, of things you can hold and catalogue and then put in a safe. Dreams give is voices, visions, ideas, mortal terrors, and departed beloveds. Nothing counts more to an individual, or less to an empire.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

“We won’t grow old together, Cyrus. But can’t you feel this mattering? He could feel it, he realized. He wished he’d said that.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!