Will Sasaki

“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!

“Can you imagine having that kind of faith?” Cyrus asked. “To be that certain of something you’ve never seen? I’m not that certain of anything. I’m not that certain of gravity.” “That certainty is what put worms in their brains, Cyrus. The only people who speak in certainties are zealots and tyrants.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

“There is an impulse in moments like this to appeal to self-interest. To say: These horrors you are allowing to happen, they will come to your doorstep one day; to repeat the famous phrase about who they came for first and who they’ll come for next. But this appeal cannot, in matter of fact, work. If the people well served by a system that condones such butchery ever truly believed the same butchery could one day be inflicted on them, they’d tear the system down tomorrow. And anyway, by the time such a thing happens, the rest of us will already be dead.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“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!