Top 80 Kaveh Akbar Quotes (2026 Update)

2. “When I awake, I ask God to slide into my head quickly before I do.”

— Kaveh Akbar

3. “Is there a vocabulary for this – one to make dailiness amplify and not diminish wonder?”

— Kaveh Akbar

4. “I lack nothing I need unless you count everything I want.”

— Kaveh Akbar

5. “All I want is to finally take off my cowboy hat and show you my jeweled horns. If we slow dance I will ask you not to tug on them but secretly I will want that very much.”

— Kaveh Akbar

6. “Every person I’ve ever met. Has been small enough. To fit. In my eye.”

— Kaveh Akbar

7. “I’ve given this coldness many names thinking if it had a name it would have a solution thinking if I called a wolf a wolf I might dull its fangs I carried the coldness like a diamond for years holding it close near as blood until one day I woke and it was fully inside me both of us ruined and unrecognizable two coins on a train track the train crushed into one.”

— Kaveh Akbar

8. “Poetry very literally, unhyperbolically saved my life... I think it’s an honor to get to spend my life in service to the thing I love best.“- Kaveh Akbar.”

— Kaveh Akbar

9. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. This may be me at my best.”

— Kaveh Akbar

10. “That the moon causes tides seems too witchy to be science.”

— Kaveh Akbar

11. “Will I ever even know when my work is done? I’m almost ready to show you the mess I’ve made.”

— Kaveh Akbar

12. “The performance of certainty seemed to be at the root of so much grief. Everyone in America seemed to be afraid and hurting and angry, starving for a fight they could win. And more than that even, they seemed certain their natural state was to be happy, contented, and rich. The genesis of everyone’s pain had to be external, such was their certainty.”

— Kaveh Akbar

13. “Love was a room that appeared when you stepped into it. Cyrus understood that now, and stepped.”

— Kaveh Akbar

14. “I wish I was only as cruel as the first time I noticed I was cruel, waving my tiny shadow over a pond to scare the copper minnows.”

— Kaveh Akbar

15. “Here I am, dying at an average pace.”

— Kaveh Akbar

16. “If you teach me something beautiful I will name it quickly before it floats away.”

— Kaveh Akbar

17. “My God, I just remembered that we die. But – but me too?! Don’t forget that for now, it’s strawberry season. – Clarice Lispector.”

— Kaveh Akbar

18. “Much of being alive is breaking.”

— Kaveh Akbar

19. “I’m learning how much of myself I don’t actually need.”

— Kaveh Akbar

20. “This makes sadness seem more like tradition.”

— Kaveh Akbar

21. “Sometimes I feel beautiful and near dying.”

— Kaveh Akbar

22. “Well, we fly through our days. We move from one decision to the next, only we’re not even aware they’re decisions. We treat our minds like crowns, these magnificent crowns on our magnificent autonomies. But our minds aren’t crowns. They’re clocks. It’s why we invest everything in our stories. Stories are the excrement of time. Someone said that.”

— Kaveh Akbar

23. “We won’t grow old together, Cyrus. But can’t you feel this mattering? He could feel it, he realized. He wished he’d said that.”

— Kaveh Akbar

24. “The story pretends to be about names but it’s actually a story about time, how time flattens everything. Family, duty, whatever. Into dirt. There’s something comforting about that, something vast and, yes, inescapable. Like bright ink spilling over everyone at once.”

— Kaveh Akbar

25. “The only people who speak in certainties are zealots and tyrants.”

— Kaveh Akbar

26. “Someone said alcohol reduces the ‘fatal intensity’ of living. Maybe it was that.”

— Kaveh Akbar

27. “It’s easy to resent those who love you. Those who are over eager with their affection. Too performative.”

— Kaveh Akbar

28. “There’s a moment of Farrokhzad where she says, I won’t see spring, these lines are all that will remain. As heaven spins, I fall into bedlam. I am gone, my heart is filled with sorrow – O Muslims, I am sad tonight.”

— Kaveh Akbar

29. “Performed pain is still pain.”

— Kaveh Akbar

30. “That was the whole martyr book. He wanted to live perfectly enough to die without creating a ripple of pain behind him, like an Olympic diver knifing splashlessly into the pool.”

— Kaveh Akbar

31. “For all our advances in science – chickens that can go from egg to harvest in a month, planes to cross the world, missiles to shoot them down – we’ve always held the same obnoxious, rotten souls. Souls that have festered for millennia while science grew. How unfair, this copper delivery. How unfair, this life. My wounds are so much deeper than yours. The arrogance of victimhood. Self-pity. Suffocating.”

— Kaveh Akbar

32. “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

33. “What distinguishes grace from everything else? Grace is unearned. If you’ve moved through the world in such a way as to feel you’ve earned cosmic compensation, then what you’ve earned is something more like justice, like propriety. Not grace. Propriety is correct. Justice is just. There’s an inescapable transactional quality: perform x good, receive y reward. Grace doesn’t work that way. It begins with the reward. Goodness never enters the equation.”

— Kaveh Akbar

34. “And then, if the girl herself was rubbled by an errant mortar shell, her eyes full of tears and aimed in their final living moment at that flower, which would weigh more on the cosmic scales: a tear of gratitude at the great beauty of a flower lifting through ash, or a tear of delirious rage?”

— Kaveh Akbar

35. “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

36. “Everything green just farms us, Cyrus thought. Feeding us oxygen and eating our corpses.”

— Kaveh Akbar

37. “Nobody thinks of now as the future past.”

— Kaveh Akbar

38. “How do we move through all this beauty without destroying it?”

— Kaveh Akbar

39. “When I say “nations,” I mean “armed marketplaces.” Always.”

— Kaveh Akbar

40. “Fear made me work hard, get better. It’s a dirty fuel, but it works. And anger? Anger helped me to leave him. To get my boys away from him as soon as I could. To come thrive in this country that didn’t even believe we were people. To prove it wrong. You can put a saddle on anger, Cyrus.”

— Kaveh Akbar

41. “Grace, that dictionary. A place where every thing was attached to a meaning.”

— Kaveh Akbar

42. “It’s difficult to be anything at all with the whole world right here for the having.”

— Kaveh Akbar

43. “I sacrificed my entire life; I sold it to the abyss. And the abyss gave me art.”

— Kaveh Akbar

44. “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

45. “Being awake was a kind of poison, and dream was the only antidote.”

— Kaveh Akbar

46. “I never really loved being alive. It’s hard to get there without some sort of distance. Hard to describe the shape of a cloud from inside the cloud. Like how I would appreciate gravity more if I’d had trouble floating off in my teens.”

— Kaveh Akbar

47. “Can you imagine just losing access to all the art that you most loved, to all the stuff that gave your living purpose? Purpose and fluency? The stuff that made you feel like a member of the human tribe? That made you want to stay alive?”

— Kaveh Akbar

48. “He felt a flash of familiar shame – his whole life had been a steady procession of him passionately loving what other people merely liked, and struggling, mostly failing, to translate to anyone else how and why everything mattered so much.”

— Kaveh Akbar

49. “Anger is a kind of fear. And fear saved you. When the world was all kneecaps and coffee tables, fear kept you safe.”

— Kaveh Akbar

50. “Grace doesn’t work that way. It begins with the reward. Goodness never enters the equation.”

— Kaveh Akbar