Akbar Quotes

Love was a room that appeared when you stepped into it.

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.

Tuhan, di dunia dan akhirat aku ingin mengabdi pada api Islam abadi pimpin aku! berkati perjuanganku! Tuhan, aku ingin maju menerjang rintangan engkar di dadaku biar menggema Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar!

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.

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

It seems very American to expect grief to change something. Like a token you cash in. A formula. Grieve x amount, receive y amount of comfort. Work a day in the grief mines and get paid in tickets to the company store.

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

I am not a slow learner I am a quick forgetter such erasing makes one voracious if you teach me something beautiful I will name it quickly before it floats away

Living happened until 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.

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.

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. And so legislators legislated, building border walls, barring citizens of there from entering here. “The pain we feel comes from them, not ourselves,” said the banners, and people cheered, certain of all the certainty. But the next day they’d wake up and find that what had hurt in them still hurt.

It’s easy for people who have sacrificed nothing to rationalize their own ordinariness by calling me lucky. But I sacrificed my entire life; I sold it to the abyss. And the abyss gave me art.

It feels so American to discount dreams because they’re not built of objects, of things you can hold and catalogue and then put in a safe. Dreams give us voices, visions, ideas, mortal terrors, and departed beloveds. Nothing counts more to an individual, or less to an empire.

just being perceived, all the time being perceived, was itself exhausting.

Painting saved me, but I can’t say I loved painting. I painted because I needed to. What I really loved, what I love, is having-painted. That was the high. Making something that would never have existed in the entirety of humanity had I not been there at that specific moment to make it.

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

If the mortal sin of the suicide is greed, to hoard stillness and calm for yourself while dispersing your riotous internal pain among all those who survive you, then the mortal sin of the martyr must be pride, the vanity, the hubris to believe not only that your death could mean more than your living, but that your death could mean more than death itself—which, because it is inevitable, means nothing.

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.

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

envy is the only deadly sin that's no fun for the sinner

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.

The implication of this is that the mind’s possibilities are limited by its concept of its potential.

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.

when you fall asleep in that sort of love you wake up with bruises on your neck

Human beings are unable to be about the serious business of living and building societies if they feel compelled to always clown or entertain others. People do not take you seriously if you don't take yourself seriously. A sense of humor brings necessary balance to an organized life, but a life of humor blinds one to life.

I'm becoming more a vessel of memories than a person it's a myth / that love lives in the heart it lives in the throat we push it out / when we speak when we gasp we take a little for ourselves / in books love can be war-ending a soldier drops his sword / to lie forking oysters into his enemy's mouth in life we hold love up to the light / to marvel at its impotence

A child can always teach an adult three things: to be happy for no reason, to always be busy with something, and to know how to demand with all his might that which he desires. It was because of that boy that I returned to Akbar.

We won't grow old together, Cyrus. But can't you feel this mattering? Right now?

an anthropologist who wrote about how the first artifact of civilization wasn’t a hammer or arrowhead, but a human femur—discovered in Madagascar—that showed signs of having healed from a bad fracture. In the animal world, a broken leg meant you starved, so a healed femur meant that some human had supported another’s long recovery, fed them, cleaned the wound. And thus, the author argued, began civilization. Augured not by an instrument of murder, but by a fracture bound, a bit of food brought back for another.

You must first be a king of your own personal kingdom. If you can't lead that kingdom on your own two feet, you can't lead a bigger kingdom

Cyrus prided himself in descending from people comfortable sitting in uncertainty. He himself knew little about anything and tried to remember that. He read once about a Sufi prayer that went “Lord, increase my bewilderment.” That was the prayer in its entirety.

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.

I'm sorry. I'm sorry. This may be me at my best

I lack nothing I need unless you count everything I want

I have long carried this load of griefs in the cage of my heart. Now I have given them to you. I hope you are strong enough to hold them.

Nobody thinks of now as the future past.

When I awake, I ask God to slide into my head quickly before I do

أما علمت أن الناظر للقدر كالناظر في عيني الشمس..كلما ازداد نظرا ازداد تحيرا

my body follows me around asking for things. I try to think louder, try to be brilliant, wildly brilliant.

I feel most like a person when I am forcing something to be silent,

I have been so careless with the words I already have. I don’t remember how to say home in my first language, or lonely, or light. I remember only delam barat tang shodeh, I miss you, and shab bekheir, goodnight. How is school going, Kaveh-joon? Delam barat tang shodeh. Are you still drinking? Shab bekheir. For so long every step I’ve taken has been from one tongue to another.

Art is where what we survive survives.

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

Much of being alive is breaking

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.

Humans are just a long emptiness waiting to be filled.

How do we move through all this beauty without destroying it?

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

We believe the future come from a dream, no matter who or where, can make it happen.

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.

This great Mughal Emperor [Akbar] was illiterate; he could neither read nor write. However, that had not stopped Akbar from cultivating the acquaintance of the most learned and cultured poets, authors, musicians, and architects of the time - relying solely on his remarkable memory during conversations with them.

To say no to a new day would be unthinkable. So each morning you said yes, then stepped into the consequence.

It’s possible, he thought, that the experience of gratitude was itself a luxury, a topless convertible driven through a rainless life.

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

She was Christian but American Christian, the kind that believed Jesus had just needed a bigger gun.

When asked about the difficulties of sculpture, Michelangelo said, “It is easy. You just chip away all the stone that isn’t David.” It’s simple to cut things out of a life. You break up with a shitty partner, quit eating bread, delete the Twitter app. You cut it out, and the shape of what’s actually killing you clarifies a little. The whole Abrahamic world invests itself in this promise: Don’t lie, don’t cheat, don’t fuck or steal or kill, and you’ll be a good person. 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. A rich man goes a whole day without killing a single homeless person and so goes to sleep content in his goodness. In another world, he’s buying crates of socks and Clif bars and tents, distributing them in city centers. But for him, abstinence reigns.

There’s this story I read one time, some old-school Muslim fairy tale, maybe it was a discarded hadith I guess, but it was all about the first time Satan sees Adam. Satan circles around him, inspecting him like a used car or something, this new creation—God’s favorite, apparently. Satan’s unimpressed, doesn’t get it. And then Satan steps into Adam’s mouth, disappears completely inside him and passes through all his guts and intestines and finally emerges out his anus. And when he gets out, Satan’s laughing and laughing. Rolling around. He passes all the way through the first man and he’s rolling around laughing, in tears, and he says to God, ‘This is what you’ve made? He’s all empty! All hollow!’ He can’t believe his luck. How easy his job is going to be. Humans are just a long emptiness waiting to be filled.

Menaklukan diri sendiri adalah kemenangan yang paling akbar.

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.

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.

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

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

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

I'm learning how much of myself I don't actually need

Here I am, dying at an average pace.

ആരവങ്ങളില്‍ ഉന്മത്തരാവാതെ, പരാജയങ്ങളില്‍ നിരാശരാവാതെ രണ്ടിലും സമചിത്തത പാലിച്ച് മാനസികോര്‍ജ്ജം നേടുന്നതിലാവണം നിങ്ങളുടെ നോട്ടം. ഇതിനര്‍ത്ഥം സൗകര്യങ്ങള്‍ ഉപയോഗിക്കരുതെന്നല്ല. നിങ്ങളെ ഉണ്ടാക്കാന്‍ നിങ്ങള്‍ വിചാരിച്ചാലേ കഴിയൂ എന്നു മാത്രമാണ്. മറ്റെല്ലാം ചെറിയ രാസത്വരകങ്ങള്‍ മാത്രം.

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.

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.

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.

Why should the Prophet Muhammad get a whole visit from an archangel? Why should Saul get to see the literal light of heaven on the road to Damascus? Of course it would be easy to establish bedrock faith after such clear-cut revelation. How was it fair to celebrate those guys for faith that wasn’t faith at all, that was just obedience to what they plainly observed to be true? And what sense did it make to punish the rest of humanity who had never been privy to such explicit revelation?

Cyrus, for months, every song I've listened to has been directly about me. About my life. And my stupid fucking life with you. Every flower has been blooming straight into my fucking face. Do you know what that is? It's like being insane. Like the fucking pigeons are speaking to me. Have you ever felt that? Do you have any idea what I'm even talking about?

my body burned like a barnful of feathers nothing was on fire but fire was on everything

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

He wanted, acutely in that moment, to be not-alive. Not to be dead, not to kill himself, but to have the burden of living lifted from his shoulders.

Will I ever even know when my work is done? I'm almost ready to show you the mess I've made

Sometimes a mind is ready to leave the world before its body

Death only breaks the cage, but it does not hurt the bird.

Never mind, just make it fun, nice and useful.

This makes sadness seem more like tradition

When people think about travelling to the past, they do it with this wild sense of self-importance. Like, ‘gosh, I better not step on that flower or my grandfather will never be born.’ But in the present we mow our lawns and poison ants and skip parties and miss birthdays all the time. We never think of the effects of that stuff… Nobody thinks of now as the future past.

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?

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.

Because if the whole universe could just explode out of Nothing and then just Be, don't you see that the opposite could also be true? That it is possible to implode and Un-Be as well as to explode and Be? That it's possible to implode and Un-Be as well as to explode and Be? That all human beings, Napoleon Bonaparte, for example, or the emperor Akbar, or Angelina Jolie or your father, could simply return to Nothing once they're...done? In a sort of Little, by which I mean personal, Un-Bang?

When young Black boys learn that there are no limits to our possibilities on the basketball courts, we create the athletic genius of Michael Jordan or Magic Johnson and in their genius, they recreate the game of basketball. When our young people know that there are no limits to their potential in the world of manufacturing, communication, physics, chemistry or the science of the human mind, then those same young Black minds who create dances on the dance floor or compose music on their bodies with the ‘hand jive’ will recreate these fields of human endeavor with the same incomparability.

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.

The story is what comes after.

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.

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.

That the moon causes tides seems too witchy to be science

I am less horrible than I could be I've never set a house on fire never thrown a firstborn off a bridge still my whole life I answered every cry for help with a pour with a turning away 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 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.

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.

In the Islamic tradition a distinction is made between two holy wars, the "greater holy war" (el-jihadul-akbar) and the "lesser holy war" (el-jihadul-ashgar). This distinction originated from a saying (hadith) of the Prophet, who on the way back from a military expedition said: "You have returned from a lesser holy war to a great holy war." The greater holy war is of an inner and spiritual nature; the other is the material war waged externally against an enemy population with the particular intent of bringing "infidel" populations under the rule of "God's Law" (al-Islam). The relationship between the "greater" and "lesser holy war", however, mirrors the relationship between the soul and the body; in order to understand the heroic asceticism or "path of action", it is necessary to understand the situation in which the two paths merge, the "lesser holy war" becoming the means through which a "greater holy war" is carried out, and vice versa: the "little holy war", or the external one, becomes almost a ritual action that expresses and gives witness to the reality of the first. Originally, orthodox Islam conceived of a unitary form of asceticism: that which is connected to the jihad or "holy war".

In the time before the fighting, before the rockets, before the warlords and their false promises, before the sudden disappearance of so many people we knew to graves or foreign lands, before the Taliban and their madness, before the smell of death hung daily in the air and the ground was soaked in blood, we lived well.

What I want to say is that I was happy. Not always, not even mostly. But I did know real, deep joy. Maybe everyone gets a certain amount to use up over a lifetime, and I just used my lifetime’s allotment especially quickly, with Leila. But I don’t think it was a tragedy, my life. Tragedies are relentless. Nobody could ask for more than what I’ve had.

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

...so how shall I live now in the unexpected present I spent so long in a lover's quarrel with my flesh the peace seems over- cautious too-polite

Is there a vocabulary for this - one to make dailiness amplify and not diminish wonder?

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

Our messiahs are hopeless and modern, they speak only in our sleep

- The Azan story - The five daily ritual prayers were regularly performed in congregation, and when the time for each prayer came the people would assemble at the site where the Mosque was being built. Everyone judged of the time by the position of the sun in the sky, or by the first signs of its light on the eastern horizon or by the dimming of its glow in the west after sunset; but opinions could differ, and the Prophet felt the need for a means of summoning the people to prayer when the right time had come. At first he thought of appointing a man to blow a horn like that of the Jews, but later he decided on a wooden clapper, ndqiis, such as the Oriental Christians used at that time, and two pieces of wood were fashioned together for that purpose. But they were never destined to be used; for one night a man of Khazraj, 'Abd Allah ibn Zayd, who had been at the Second 'Aqabah, had a dream whieh the next day he recounted to the Prophet: "There passed by me a man wearing two green garments and he carried in his hand a ndqiis, so I said unto him: "0 slave of God, wilt thou sell me that naqusi" "What wilt thou do with it?" he said. "We will summon the people to prayer with it," I answered. "Shall I not show thee a better way?" he said. "What way is that?" I asked, and he answered: "That thou shouldst say: God is most Great, Alldhu Akbar." The man in green repeated this magnification four times, then each of the following twice: I testify that there is no god but God; I testify that Muhammad is the messenger of God; come unto the prayer; come unto salvation; God is most Great; and then once again there is no god but God. The Prophet said that this was a true vision, and he told him to go to Bilal, who had an excellent voice, and teach him the words exactly as he had heard them in his sleep. The highest house in the neighbourhood of the Mosque belonged to a woman of the clan of Najjar, and Bilal would come there before every dawn and would sit on the roof waiting for the daybreak. When he saw the first faint light in the east he would stretch out his arms and say in supplication: "0 God I praise Thee, and I ask Thy Help for Quraysh, that they may accept Thy religion." Then he would stand and utter the call to prayer.

But surely Uncle Akbar could not be dead as they were dead? There must be something indestructible — something that remained of men who had walked and talked with one and told one stories, men whom one had loved and looked up to. But where had it gone? It was all very puzzling, and he did not understand.

At the intersection of Iranian-ness and Midwestern-ness was pathological politeness, an immobilizing compulsivity to avoid causing distress in anyone else. Cyrus thought about this a lot. You cooed at their ugly babies, nodded along with their racist bullshit. In Iran it was called taarof, the elaborate and almost entirely unspoken choreography of etiquette that directs every social interaction. The old joke, that two Iranian men could never get on an elevator because they’ll just keep saying “you go,” “no you,” “no no please,” “I insist,” as the doors opened and closed. Midwestern politeness felt that way too, Cyrus learned, like it was burning cigarette holes in your soul. You bit your tongue, then bit it a little harder. You tried to keep your face still enough to tell yourself you hadn’t been complicit, that at least you weren’t encouraging what was happening around you. To you.

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.

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

গতানুগতিক প্রজ্ঞা সব সময় সত্য নয়। সমাজজীবনে সত্য অত্যন্ত জটিল। তার সঠিক উপলদ্ধি করতে হলে অনেক মানসিক পরিশ্রমের প্রয়োজন। এ পরিশ্রম এড়ানোর জন্য মানুষ গতানুগতিক প্রজ্ঞা আঁকড়ে ধরে থাকতে চায়। গতানুগতিক প্রজ্ঞার ব্যাখ্যা হলো সহজ, সুবিধাজনক, স্বস্তিদায়ক ও চিন্তামুক্ত। গতানুগতিক প্রজ্ঞা আমাদের স্বার্থ সংরক্ষণ করে এবং আমাদের মনে কোনো উদ্বেগের সৃষ্টি হতে দেয়না। কিন্তু গতানুগতিক প্রজ্ঞায় সব সময় সত্য মেলেনা।

Akbar took Brahmins to task for misrepresenting Hindu texts to lower castes and hoped that translating Sanskrit texts into Persian would prompt these (in his opinion) arrogant leaders to reform their ways.

Cyrus also worried that the whole idea of gratitude was possibly classist, or worse. Did a poor Syrian child, whose living and dying had been indelibly shaped by the murderous whims of evil men, qualify for grace only if she possessed a superhuman ability to look beyond her hardship and notice the beauty of a single flower growing through a pile of rubble? And would the gratitude for that flower be contaminated by the awareness, or ignorance, of the bodies turning to soil beneath it?

Sometimes I feel beautiful and near dying

The barbarism of eating anything seems almost unbearable

Wrath is the desire to repay what you've suffered.

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.

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.

Di negara Jancukers. Allahu Akbar nilainya tinggi, yaitu untuk mengusir penjajah Belanda dulu dan untuk mengusir Jepang. Tidak seperti di negara tetangga, Allahu Akbar dipakai untuk melawan orang makan di warung Tegal.

Maybe it's because we could pass along science. You wrote a fact in a book and there it sat until someone born five hundred years later improved it. Refined it, implemented it more usefully. Easy. You couldn't do that with soul-learning. We all started from zero. From less than zero, actually. We started whiny, without grace. Obsessed only with our own needing. And the dead couldn't teach us anything about that. No facts or tables or proofs. You just had to live and suffer and then teach our kids to do the same.

For our species, the idea of art as ornament is a relatively new one. Our ape brains got too big, too big for our heads, too big for our mothers to birth them. So we started keeping all our extra knowing in language, in art, in stories and books and songs. Art was a way of storing our brains in each other’s. It wasn’t until fairly recently in human history, when rich landowners wanted something pretty to look at in winter, that the idea of art-as-mere-ornament came around. A painting of a blooming rose to hang on the mantel when the flowers outside the window had gone to ice. And still in the twenty-first century, it’s hard for folks to move past that. This idea that beauty is the horizon toward which all great art must march. I’ve never been interested in that. “As heaven spins, I fall into bedlam.

Mona told herself that even if her recent feelings were a delusion, they were by far preferable to the thirty years of immaculate deception she had suffered in her first marriage. Yet she had to forgive Akbar Ahmad - perhaps because he was already dead.

He wanted to be on "the right side of history," whatever that was. But more than that (he admitted this to himself when he was practicing being rigorously honest), he wanted other people to perceive him as someone who cares about being on the right side of history. Its's hard to imagine an earth martyr who was also a fervent eugenicist, or one who had supported Mussolini. Being on the right side of history seemed a bedrock feature of the sort of people in whom he was interested.

Find your way, create the future.

If you teach me something beautiful I will name it quickly before it floats away

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

What was left of his life had no intrinsic meaning, he knew, since such meaning could only be shaped in relation to other people.

Angela Davis would say we're all selling our bodies. That the only difference between a coal miner and a prostitute is our retrograde puritan values about sex. And mysogyny.

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

Performed pain is still pain

Now it's lonely all over

Akbar proposed that ‘all religions are either equally true or equally illusory’.

In “The Palace,” Kaveh Akbar writes that “Art is where what we survive survives,” and I think that’s true not only of the art we make, but also of the art we love.

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

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.

Wenn ich rechne und sehe ein winziges Insekt das auf meine Papier geflogen ist dann fühle ich etwas wie Allah ist Gross (Allahu Akbar) und wir sind armseliges Tröpfe mit unseren ganzen Wissenschaften Herrlichkeit

A year and a half ago in early recovery, Cyrus told his AA sponsor Gabe that he believed himself to be a fundamentally bad person. Selfish, self-seeking. Cruel, even. A drunk horse thief who stops drinking is just a sober horse thief, Cyrus'd said, feeling proud to have thought it. He'd use versions of that line later in two different poems. "But you're not a bad person trying to get good. You're a sick person trying to get well," Gabe responded. Cyrus sat with the thought. Gabe went on, "There's no difference to the outside world between a good guy and a bad guy behaving like a good guy. In fact, I think God loves that second guy a little more." "Good-person drag," Cyrus thought out loud. That's what they called it after that.

The moon floats in a dark blue space, and shames billions of stars by its light. She has things to tell you; in fact she is talking to you,

the addictions that were killing me fastest were the ones I loved best

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

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.

You can put a saddle on anger, Cyrus.

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.

One way to live a life is to spend each moment asking for forgiveness for the last

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

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

All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.

Look me in the eyes and stop being sad—

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.

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.

Somewhere between ‘I love you’ and ‘but’ is mankind, a giant loneliness strolling through an even greater loneliness. — Negar Emrani (trans. Kaveh Akbar), “Somewhere Between the World and the Mirror,” published in Asymptote (April 2017) (via bostonpoetryslam)

Being a Fangirl doesn't mean that you get all the answers right to 'So you think you're a fan of....' quizzes, or that you have dedicated an Instagram account to it. Being a Fangirl is connecting with the characters, reading the books over and over, getting the feels.

বাঙ্গালীদের পিতা বা পিতামহের পরিচয়ের সমস্যা নেই। সমস্যা হল বিত্তের। যতদিন পর্যন্ত দারিদ্র্যের নির্মম কশাঘাতে তারা জর্জরিত হবে, ততদিন পর্যন্ত বাঙ্গালীরা অতীতের ইতিহাসে এবং পরকালে সান্ত্বনা খুঁজে বেড়াবে।

It feels so American to discount dreams because they're not built of objects, of things you can hold and catalogue and then put in a safe. Dreams give is voices, visions, ideas, mortal terrors, and departed beloveds. Nothing counts more to an individual, or less to an empire.

The whole Abrahamic world invests itself in this promise: Don't lie, don't cheat, don't fuck or steal or kill, and you'll be a good person. 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. A rich man goes a whole day without killing a single homeless person and so goes to sleep content in his goodness. In another world, he's buying crates of socks and Clif bars and tents, distributing them in city centers. But for him, abstinence reigns.

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?

If the moral sin of suicide is greed, to hoard stillness and calm for yourself while dispersing your riotous internal pain among all those who survive you, then the mortal sin of the martyr must be pride, the vanity, the hubris to believe not only that your death could mean more than your living, but that your death could mean more than death itself — which, because it is inevitable, means nothing

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.

Mujāhada, a collateral form of jihād (the so-called "holy war"), taken [by Sufis] to mean "earnest striving after the mystical life." The term is based on the Koranic text, "And they that strive earnestly in Our cause, them We surely guide upon Our paths." A Tradition makes the Prophet rank the "greater warfare" (al jihad al-akbar) above the "lesser warfare" (al jihad al-asghar, i.e., the war against infidelity), and explain the "greater warfare" as meaning "earnest striving with the carnal soul" (mujāhadat al-nafs).

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.

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.

Happiness not belong to the great in everything, happiness just belong to someone who find a simple things in his life and still remain grateful.

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

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

When you are ten, shame stitches itself into you like a monogram, broadcasting to the world what holds you, what rules your soul.

The ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr.

I don’t remember how to say home in my first language, or lonely, or light I remember only delam barat tang shodeh, I miss you, and shab bekheir, goodnight.

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.

Reputation just a skin, integrity means a soul.

Starting something new is not enough with curiosity, but must be with guts.

Joyfulness is the highest form of gratitude.

When you pretend to be anything other than your true self, you are depriving the world of your true gift, the magic that is you.

I mean, I don't want whatever bullshit tactical non-secret secret that passed for intimacy down there. I want you to tell me something real.

It's difficult to be anything at all with the whole world right here for the having

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.

Maybe you'll find your real ending once you stop looking for it. I think real endings tend to work their way in from the outside

We spend our lives trying to figure out how to pay back the debt of being. And to whom we might pay it.

Well, of course I changed my mind, I was presented with new information, that’s the definition of critical thinking.

The difference between wanting to not be alive and wanting to die.

NOTHING should more deeply shame the modern student than the recency and inadequacy of his acquaintance with India. Here is a vast peninsula of nearly two million square miles; two-thirds as large as the United States, and twenty times the size of its master, Great Britain; 320,000,000 souls, more than in all North and South America combined, or one-fifth of the population of the earth; an impressive continuity of development and civilization from Mohenjo-daro, 2900 B.C. or earlier, to Gandhi, Raman and Tagore; faiths compassing every stage from barbarous idolatry to the most subtle and spiritual pantheism; philosophers playing a thousand variations on one monistic theme from the Upanishads eight centuries before Christ to Shankara eight centuries after him; scientists developing astronomy three thousand years ago, and winning Nobel prizes in our own time; a democratic constitution of untraceable antiquity in the villages, and wise and beneficent rulers like Ashoka and Akbar in the capitals; minstrels singing great epics almost as old as Homer, and poets holding world audiences today; artists raising gigantic temples for Hindu gods from Tibet to Ceylon and from Cambodia to Java, or carving perfect palaces by the score for Mogul kings and queens—this is the India that patient scholarship is now opening up, like a new intellectual continent, to that Western mind which only yesterday thought civilization an exclusively European thing.I

Because of language, this sound stands for this thing, that sounds stands for that thing, all these invented sounds strutting around, certain as roosters. It is no wonder we got it so wrong.

Today, in a world fatally fractured along religious lines, it seems inconceivable that in the sixteenth century an emperor worked so hard to promote religious harmony and reverence for all faiths.

Cyrus thought about President Invective, a cartoon ghoul of a man for whom Dantean ideas of Hell seemed specifically conceived. The sort of man whose unwavering assertions of his own genius competence had, to the American public, apparently overwhelmed all observable evidence to the contrary. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Creativity didn’t live in my brain any more than walking lived in my legs. It lived in every painting I ever saw, every book I ever read, every conversation I ever had. The world was full enough that I didn’t need to store anything inside myself.

Some people don’t even want to drink, aren’t tempted by the pools of liquor all around them. This seems a selfishness. God loves the hungry more than the full. Faith is a story about people totally unlike you building concrete walls around their beds. Behind each of their faces: a slowly dying animal. Do you feel summoned? Do you feel heaven closing itself to you like a clamshell snapping shut?

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.

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?

When my children enter college I trust that education will open to them many paths toward the understanding of life. “May my son study history,” said Napoleon at St. Helena, “for it is the only true philosophy, and the only true psychology.” Psychology is largely a theory of human behavior, philosophy is too often an ideal of human behavior, and history is occasionally a record of human behavior. We cannot trust all the historians, for sometimes, like Akbar’s, they were engaged by their heroes and gave them all the virtues and the victories. But no man is educated, or fit for statesmanship, who cannot see his time in the perspective of the past. Every lad and lass should begin, in high school, an orderly recapitulation of the pageant of history; not, as we used to do, with Greece and Rome, which were the old age of the ancient world, but with Mesopotamia and Egypt and Crete, from which civilization flowed over into Greece and Rome, and through them to Northern Europe and ourselves.

Have you ever seen, in the fall, trees shedding their leaves like rain, in the fall breeze? Have you seen the madness of falling leaves?? Have you seen them dancing and swirling in ecstasy?? They are like the swirling dervish, so deep in trance, he might never awaken?? They throw themselves upon the ground, at your feet, in passionate frenzy!! It appears in the fraction of a second and disappears, just as quickly, wild with the sorrow of loss, yet, excited in the certainty, that spring will come again. What I would give to be one of them, be in that dance, feel the electrifying energy!!Indescribable beauty is all around us. Showtimes will not be announced. Be on the lookout.

I’ve read your poems, Cyrus. I get that you’re Persian. Born there, raised here. I know that’s a part of you. But you’ve probably spent more time looking at your phone today, just today, than you’ve spent cutting open pomegranates in your entire life. Cumulatively. Right? But how many fucking pomegranates are in your poems? Versus how many iPhones? Do you see what I mean?

Lord Charles Canning, the last Governor-General and first viceroy of India (the transition from East India Company rule to the British Crown took place during his turbulent tenure, 1856–62) wrote candidly to Vernon Smith, president of the Board of Control, on 21 November 1857, at the height of the ‘mutiny’: ‘As we must rule 150 million of people by a handful [of] Englishmen, let us do it in a manner best calculated to leave them divided (as in religion and national feeling they already are) and to inspire them with the greatest possible awe of our power and with the least possible suspicion of our motives’.

An economically devastated Bengal became too weak to fight back the famine of 1769–70; it is estimated that 10 million, out of a population of 30 million, died. ‘In fact, British control of India started with a famine in Bengal in 1770 and ended in a famine – again in Bengal – in 1943. Working in the midst of the terrible 1877 famine that he estimated had cost another 10 million lives, Cornelius Walford calculated that in the 120 years of British rule there had been thirty-four famines in India, compared with only seventeen recorded famines in the entire previous two millennia,’ writes Robins. The Mughal response to famine had been good governance: embargo on food export, anti-speculation regulation, tax relief and free kitchens. If any merchant short-changed a peasant during a famine, the punishment was an equivalent weight in flesh from his body. That kept hoarding down.

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.

I want to be the chisel, not the David. What can I make of being here? And what can I make of not? Normal people think of recovery as a kind of abstinence: they imagine us sitting around white-knuckled, sweating as we count our hours trying desperately to distract ourselves enough to not relapse. This is because for normal people, drinking is an activity, like brushing their teeth or watching TV. They can reasonably imagine excising drinking, like any other activity, without collapsing their entire person. For a drunk, there’s nothing but drink. There was nothing in my life that wasn’t predicated on getting drunk—either getting fucked up itself or getting money to get fucked up by working or slinging this drug for that drug or that drug for cash. Getting sober means having to figure out how to spend twenty-four hours a day. It means building an entirely new personality, learning how to move your face, your fingers. It meant learning how to eat, how to speak among people and walk and fuck and worse than any of that, learning how to just sit still. You’re moving into a house the last tenants trashed. You spend all your time ripping up the piss-carpet, filling in the holes in the wall, and you also somehow have to remember to feed yourself and make rent and not punch every person who talks to you in the face. There’s no abstinence in it. There’s no self-will. It’s a chisel. It’s surrender to the chisel. Of course you don’t hope to come out a David. It’s miracle enough to emerge still standing on two feet.

When asked about the difficulties of sculpture, Michelangelo said, “It is easy. You just chip away all the stone that isn’t David.” It’s simple to cut things out of a life. You break up with a shitty partner, quit eating bread, delete the Twitter app. You cut it out, and the shape of what’s actually killing you clarifies a little. The whole Abrahamic world invests itself in this promise: Don’t lie, don’t cheat, don’t fuck or steal or kill, and you’ll be a good person. 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. A rich man goes a whole day without killing a single homeless person and so goes to sleep content in his goodness. In another world, he’s buying crates of socks and Clif bars and tents, distributing them in city centers. But for him, abstinence reigns. I want to be the chisel, not the David. What can I make of being here? And what can I make of not? Normal people think of recovery as a kind of abstinence: they imagine us sitting around white-knuckled, sweating as we count our hours trying desperately to distract ourselves enough to not relapse. This is because for normal people, drinking is an activity, like brushing their teeth or watching TV. They can reasonably imagine excising drinking, like any other activity, without collapsing their entire person. For a drunk, there’s nothing but drink. There was nothing in my life that wasn’t predicated on getting drunk—either getting fucked up itself or getting money to get fucked up by working or slinging this drug for that drug or that drug for cash. Getting sober means having to figure out how to spend twenty-four hours a day. It means building an entirely new personality, learning how to move your face, your fingers. It meant learning how to eat, how to speak among people and walk and fuck and worse than any of that, learning how to just sit still. You’re moving into a house the last tenants trashed. You spend all your time ripping up the piss-carpet, filling in the holes in the wall, and you also somehow have to remember to feed yourself and make rent and not punch every person who talks to you in the face. There’s no abstinence in it. There’s no self-will. It’s a chisel. It’s surrender to the chisel. Of course you don’t hope to come out a David. It’s miracle enough to emerge still standing on two feet. —from BOOKOFMARTYRS.docx by Cyrus Shams

Leila sat up too, scooted closer to me, still on her knees. She grabbed the middle finger of my right hand and, shutting her left eye, held my finger gently but firmly on top of her closed eyelid. “Do you feel this?” she said, moving her open eye up, down, up, down. Beneath the eyelid beneath my finger, her other eye was matching the movements of its sibling. “You feel how even the closed eye is still searching for your face?” I nodded. Her hand tapped, pum PO-POP pum, pum POP-POP pum. “That,” Leila said, “is how I have been searching for you.

Maybe it’s because we could pass along science. You wrote a fact in a book and there it sat until someone born five hundred years later improved it. Refined it, implemented it more usefully. Easy. You couldn’t do that with soul-learning. We all started from zero. From less than zero, actually. We started whiny, without grace. Obsessed only with our own needing. And the dead couldn’t teach us anything about that. No facts or tables or proofs. You just had to live and suffer and then teach your kids to do the same. From a distance, habit passing for happiness.

double-consciousness, how Black people in America always have to be mindful of how racist white people see them. And how that applies to a lot of marginalized people, always having to see themselves through the eyes of the folks who hate them. And being an Iranian vaguely Muslim man in a country that hates those things, each of those things, and then also writing about martyrdom, obsessing honestly over what that word might mean for me in my own life or in my own death…It’s just hard not to think about, like, ‘what would a person who hates me think about this.’ 

Booze worked that way sometimes, clarifying—briefly—what his mind couldn’t. It was like sitting in the optometrist’s office, booze flashing its different lenses in front of your face and sometimes, for a second, it’d be the right prescription, the one that allowed you to catch a glimpse of the world as it was, beyond your grief, beyond your doom. That was the clarity alcohol, and nothing else, gave. Seeing life as everyone else did, as a place that could accommodate you. But of course a second later it’d zoom past clarity through a flurry of increasingly opaque lenses until all you were able to see would be the dark of your own skull.

grace. Obsessed only with our own needing. And the dead couldn’t teach us anything about that. No facts or tables or proofs. You just had to live and suffer and then teach your kids to do the same. From a distance, habit passing for happiness. Go to work. Dig through shavings, find the eggs. Eat. Clean the eggs. Put down new shavings. Clear the driplines. Go home. Eat with Cyrus. Put on basketball, put on a movie. Drink. Dreamless sleep. Medicine-deep. Go to work. Find the eggs. 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.

GOD I am ready for you to come back. Whether in a train full of dying criminals or on the gleaming saddle of a locust, you are needed again. The earth is a giant chessboard where the dark squares get all the rain. On this one the wet is driving people mad—the bankers all baying in the woods while their markets fail, a florist chewing up flowers to spit mouthfuls here and there as his daughter’s lungs seize shut from the pollen. There is a flat logic to neglect. Sweet nothings sour in the air while the ocean hoots itself to sleep. I live on the skull of a giant burning brain, the earth’s core. Sometimes I can feel it pulsing through the dirt, though even this you ignore. The mind wants what it wants: daily newspapers, snapping turtles, a pound of flesh. The work I’ve been doing is a kind of erasing. I dump my ashtray into a bucket of paint and coat myself in the gray slick, rolling around on the carpets of rich strangers while they applaud and sip their scotch. A body can cause almost anything to happen. Remember when you breathed through my mouth, your breath becoming mine? Remember when you sang for me and I fell to the floor, turning into a thousand mice? Whatever it was we were practicing cannot happen without you. I thought I saw you last year, bark wrapped around your thighs, lurching toward the shore at dawn. It was only mist and dumb want. They say even longing has its limits: in a bucket, an eel will simply stop swimming long before it starves. Wounded wolves will pad away from their pack to die lonely and cold. Do you not know how scary it can get here? The talons that dropped me left long scars around my neck that still burn in the wind. I was promised epiphany, earth- honey, and a flood of milk, but I will settle for anything that brings you now, you still-hungry mongrel, you glut of bone, you, scentless as gold.