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“Do you have this organ here?â€� Cyrus asked her, pointing at the base of his throat. “A doom organ that just pulses all the time? Pulses dread, every day, obstinately? Like it thinks there’s a panther behind the curtain ready to maul you, but there’s no panther and it turns out there’s no curtain either? That’s what I wanted to stop.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

“An alphabet, like a life, is a finite set of shapes. With it, one can produce almost anything.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

“As if to incentivize the whole ordeal, the body offered you dreams. In exchange for a third of your living, you were offered sprawling feasts, exotic adventures, beautiful lovers, wings. Or at least the promise of them, made only slightly less intoxicating by the curious threat of nightmare. How sometimes, at random, your mind would decide to reduce you to a whimper, or a gasp, in the night.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

“there was a word for this: sonder. “The realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.â€� Incredible, how naming something took nothing away from its stagger. Language could be totally impotent like that.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

“Cyrus thought about what an aggressively human leader on earth might look like. One who, instead of defending decades-old obviously wrong positions, said, “Well, of course I changed my mind, I was presented with new information, that’s the definition of critical thinking.â€� That it seemed impossible to conceive of a political leader making such a statement made Cyrus mad, then sad.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

“It’s possible, he thought, that the experience of gratitude was itself a luxury, a topless convertible driven through a rainless life.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

“She was looking at herself in the little gold mirror we had hanging near the entrance. It was something I’d come to love about her, in time. It wasn’t narcissism, the way she was always looking at herself. I recognized later there was a kind of wonder in it, running her fingers over her smile lines, the skin of her forehead, as if to say, “Where did you come from? This skin, what a strange envelope!”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

“I took a shower and passed out. I remained. But so did the dread. I thought getting sober would help, that came later. Recovery. And it did, in its way. Certainly it made me less a burden to the people around me, created less dread in them. But it’s still in me, that doom organ.â€� He pointed again at his neck. “It’s in my throat, throbbing all day every day. And recovery, friends, art—that shit just numbs it for a second. What’s that word you used?â€� “Palliative?”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

“The iron law of sobriety, with apologies to Leo Tolstoy: the stories of addicts are all alike; but each person gets sober their own way. Addiction is an old country song: you lose the dog, lose the truck, lose the high school sweetheart. In recovery you play the song backward, and that’s where things get interesting. Where’d you find the truck? Did the dog remember you? What’d your sweetheart say when they saw you again?”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

“Eight of the ten commandments are about what thou shalt not. But you can live a whole life not doing any of that stuff and still avoid doing any good. That’s the whole crisis. The rot at the root of everything. The belief that goodness is built on a constructed absence, not-doing. That belief corrupts everything, has everyone with any power sitting on their hands.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

“Where does all our effort go? It’s hard not to envy the monsters when you see how good they have it. And how unbothered they are at being monsters.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

“When I say “nations,â€� I mean “armed marketplaces.â€� Always.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

“just being perceived, all the time being perceived, was itself exhausting.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!