Top 80 Kaveh Akbar Quotes (2026 Update)

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

— Kaveh Akbar

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

— Kaveh Akbar

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

— Kaveh Akbar

4. “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

5. “Sometimes a mind is ready to leave the world before its body.”

— 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. “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

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

— Kaveh Akbar

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

— Kaveh Akbar

15. “Much of being alive is breaking.”

— Kaveh Akbar

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

— Kaveh Akbar

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

— Kaveh Akbar

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

— Kaveh Akbar

19. “Performed pain is still pain.”

— Kaveh Akbar

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

— Kaveh Akbar

21. “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

22. “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

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

— Kaveh Akbar

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

— Kaveh Akbar

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

— Kaveh Akbar

26. “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

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

— Kaveh Akbar

28. “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

29. “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

30. “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

31. “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

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

— Kaveh Akbar

33. “I died, if you’re reading this, in a museum, of a disgusting and unbeautifiable disease. I reject the reduction of my life to this most grotesque artifact.”

— Kaveh Akbar

34. “One way to live a life is to spend each moment asking for forgiveness for the last.”

— Kaveh Akbar

35. “Can you imagine having that kind of faith?” Cyrus asked. “To be that certain of something you’ve never seen? I’m not that certain of anything. I’m not that certain of gravity.” “That certainty is what put worms in their brains, Cyrus. The only people who speak in certainties are zealots and tyrants.”

— Kaveh Akbar

36. “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

37. “Maybe it was that Cyrus had done the wrong drugs in the right order, or the right drugs in the wrong order, but when God finally spoke back to him after twenty-seven years of silence, what Cyrus wanted more than anything else was a do-over.”

— Kaveh Akbar

38. “Some days we can see Venus in midafternoon. Then at night, stars separated by billions of miles, light traveling years to die in the back of an eye.”

— Kaveh Akbar

39. “The story is what comes after.”

— Kaveh Akbar

40. “Often in my life, in the throes of despair, of my husband’s abuse, I have held the certainty of the damned, that sense of “everything is going to be just this, this misery forever, till I die.” An irrepressible inescapable horror stretching out infinitely in every direction. Tragic, that only terror feels that way.”

— Kaveh Akbar

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

— Kaveh Akbar

42. “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

43. “Humans are just a long emptiness waiting to be filled.”

— Kaveh Akbar

44. “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

45. “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

46. “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

47. “Do you have this organ here?” 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

48. “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

49. “Now it’s lonely all over.”

— Kaveh Akbar

50. “Each giraffe had the long eyelashes of horses, and those same sad eyes, like they knew they weren’t made for this world. Or worse, like they knew they were.”

— Kaveh Akbar