Neshat

“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 our kids to do the same.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

“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!

“Angela Davis would say we're all selling our bodies. That the only difference between a coal miner and a prostitute is our retrograde puritan values about sex. And mysogyny.”
― kaveh akbar, Martyr!

“Everyone loves a particular version of you, and when that person is gone, that version goes with them.”
― Liane Moriarty, Here One Moment