Tara ☆

“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 your kids to do the same. From a distance, habit passing for happiness.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

“Often in my life, in the throes of despair, of my husband's abuse, I have held the certainty of the damned, that sense of "everything is going to be just this, this misery forever, till I die." An irrepressible inescapable horror stretching out infinitely in every direction. Tragic, that only terror feels that way.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

“How do we move through all this beauty without destroying it?”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

“What was left of his life had no intrinsic meaning, he knew, since such meaning could only be shaped in relation to other people.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!