Top 80 Kaveh Akbar Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “When you are ten, shame stitches itself into you like a monogram, broadcasting to the world what holds you, what rules your soul.”

— Kaveh Akbar

52. “Expendable” may seem a bad word to use to describe your own life, except I actually find it liberating. The way it vents away all pressure to become. How it asks only that you be.”

— Kaveh Akbar

53. “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

54. “A photograph can say “This is what it was.” Language can only say “This is what it was like.”

— Kaveh Akbar

55. “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

56. “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

57. “I am glad I still exist glad for cats and moss and Turkish indigo and yet to be light upon the earth to be steel bent around an endless black to once again be God’s own tuning fork and yet and yet.”

— Kaveh Akbar

58. “So much of his psychic bandwidth was taken up with conflicting thoughts about political prepositions. The morality of almond milk. The ethics of yoga. The politics of sonnets. There was nothing in his life that wasn’t contaminated by what he mostly mindlessly called “late capitalism.” He hated it, like everyone was supposed to. But it was a hate that made nothing happen.”

— Kaveh Akbar

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

— Kaveh Akbar

60. “What do you, specifically, want from your unprecedented, never-to-be-repeated existence?”

— Kaveh Akbar

61. “Any volcano that has erupted since the Holocene, ancient history, is considered active. I haven’t. Does that make me inert? Or overdue?”

— Kaveh Akbar

62. “Behind me is silence, and ahead of me is silence.’ And that was it. That was her whole answer. Isn’t that perfect?” “Yeah, that’s beautiful,” said Cyrus, though it confused him. “What I mean is, I think maybe you’ll find your real ending once you stop looking for it,” Orkideh said. “I think real endings tend to work their way in from the outside.”

— Kaveh Akbar

63. “Ali’s anger felt ravenous, almost supernatural, like a dead dog hungry for its own bones.”

— Kaveh Akbar

64. “The barbarism of eating anything seems almost unbearable.”

— Kaveh Akbar

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

— Kaveh Akbar

66. “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

67. “An alphabet, like a life, is a finite set of shapes. With it, one can produce almost anything.”

— Kaveh Akbar

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

— Kaveh Akbar

69. “When you are ten, shame stitches itself into you like a monogram, broadcasting to the world what holds you, what rules your soul. In school Roya could smell the dank must even though she’d soaped it away and changed into fresh clothes. The scent wasn’t so much on her as it was of her, compositional. It clung inside her nose like a kind of rot. She was certain everyone else could smell it.”

— Kaveh Akbar

70. “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

71. “Our messiahs are hopeless and modern, they speak only in our sleep.”

— Kaveh Akbar

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

— Kaveh Akbar

73. “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

74. “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.” That it seemed impossible to conceive of a political leader making such a statement made Cyrus mad, then sad.”

— Kaveh Akbar

75. “You can put a saddle on anger, Cyrus.”

— Kaveh Akbar

76. “I want to be worthy of the great terror my existence inspires.”

— Kaveh Akbar

77. “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.”

— Kaveh Akbar

78. “Grace to live at all – none of us did anything to deserve it. Being born. We spend our lives trying to figure out how to pay back the debt of being. And to whom we might pay it.”

— Kaveh Akbar

79. “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

80. “All those severe poets talking big about the wages of sin all the time,” Zee added, “but nobody ever brought up the wages of virtue. The toll of trying really really hard to be good in a game that’s totally rigged against goodness.”

— Kaveh Akbar

81. “Then imagine,” Kareem said, “that a bunch of people who’d never met you, for whom you’re just a myth, began sending you the art you loved, or the art they loved, the art they thought you might love too. An old woman sending a bunch of old standards. Or an eight-year-old boy sending you his prized Monkees record. Imagine how that might contribute to your sense of amongness. To your sense of earth maybe actually being the right place for you.”

— Kaveh Akbar

82. “What was there to complain about? A murdered wife? A sore back? The wrong grade copper? Living happened till it didn’t. There was no choice in it. To say no to a new day would be unthinkable. So each morning you said yes, then stepped into the consequence.”

— Kaveh Akbar

83. “That’s when everything became supersaturated. One of those memories you can squeeze like a rag and watch details drip and pool.”

— Kaveh Akbar

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

— Kaveh Akbar

85. “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

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

— Kaveh Akbar

87. “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