Holly

“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!

“I felt that if I could only get to beauty, something speechless and formless would be absolved in me--if I could only get beyond my own hands lathered in soap, chapped from flour and coins, hands which did not touch or receive touch, hands sewing by a circle of lamplight. ...Of course I know now that beauty is relative. Now I can pine for the swallows nesting in the roof of the lavoir, the dry dirt and grass under my feet, the river's winding path. Even a newly mopped flagstone, butter melting on potatoes, a mended white cloth to shake out over a table and set with things gleaming sharp and bright.”
― Sophie Mackintosh, Cursed Bread

“I hate it when our human attempts to inflict order upon the land bring death and pain and mutilation to these innocents, whose ancestors enjoyed the earth for tens of millions of years before the naked ape appeared with his technology and enraging awareness of his own sin.”
― John Updike, Toward the End of Time

“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, Martyr!