Julia

“When people think about travelling to the past, they do it with this wild sense of self-importance. Like, ‘gosh, I better not step on that flower or my grandfather will never be born.’ But in the present we mow our lawns and poison ants and skip parties and miss birthdays all the time. We never think of the effects of that stuff… Nobody thinks of now as the future past.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

“Only in a culture that privileged infallibility above all else could a man like President Invective rise to power—a man insulated since birth from any sense of accountability, raised in a pristine cocoon of inherited wealth to emerge pristine, dewy, wholly unsullied by those irksome mortal foibles, grief and doubt.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

“But we latch on to criticisms of our personhood when we fear they might be accurate. I always had the feeling I was at least partially mad, and so it was hard to completely disbelieve my mother.”
― Madeleine Gray, Green Dot: A Novel

“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!