Azadeh

“Everything green just farms us, Cyrus thought. Feeding us oxygen and eating our corpses.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

“Because a living person has their own reality, he says. The person who's gone has no reality anymore, except in thoughts. And once they're gone from thoughts, they actually are completely gone. If I don't think about him, literally, I'm ending his existence.”
― Sally Rooney, Intermezzo

“what if life is just a collection of essentially unrelated experiences? Why does one thing have to follow meaningfully from another?”
― Sally Rooney, Intermezzo

“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.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!