Top 80 Kaveh Akbar Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “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

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

— Kaveh Akbar

53. “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

54. “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

55. “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

56. “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

57. “The story is what comes after.”

— Kaveh Akbar

58. “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

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

— Kaveh Akbar

60. “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

61. “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

62. “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

63. “Now it’s lonely all over.”

— Kaveh Akbar

64. “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

65. “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

66. “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

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

— Kaveh Akbar

68. “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

69. “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

70. “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

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

— Kaveh Akbar

72. “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

73. “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

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

— Kaveh Akbar

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

— Kaveh Akbar

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

— Kaveh Akbar

77. “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

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

— Kaveh Akbar

79. “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

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

— Kaveh Akbar

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

— Kaveh Akbar

82. “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

83. “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

84. “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

85. “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

86. “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

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

— Kaveh Akbar