Tara ☆

“If the moral sin of suicide is greed, to hoard stillness and calm for yourself while dispersing your riotous internal pain among all those who survive you, then the mortal sin of the martyr must be pride, the vanity, the hubris to believe not only that your death could mean more than your living, but that your death could mean more than death itself — which, because it is inevitable, means nothing”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

“Maybe you'll find your real ending once you stop looking for it. I think real endings tend to work their way in from the outside”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

“She lived for something. And she knew when she was done living. That’s not nothing.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

“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!