Calling a Wolf a Wolf Quotes

“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”
― Kaveh Akbar, Calling a Wolf a Wolf

“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”
― Kaveh Akbar, Calling a Wolf a Wolf

“I'm sorry. I'm sorry. This may be me at my best”
― Kaveh Akbar, Calling a Wolf a Wolf

“I lack nothing I need unless you count everything I want”
― Kaveh Akbar, Calling a Wolf a Wolf

“my body follows me around asking
for things. I try to think louder, try
to be brilliant, wildly brilliant.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Calling a Wolf a Wolf

“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.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Calling a Wolf a Wolf

“I feel most like a person when I am forcing something to be silent,”
― Kaveh Akbar, Calling a Wolf a Wolf

“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.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Calling a Wolf a Wolf

“when you fall asleep in that sort of love you wake up with bruises on your neck”
― Kaveh Akbar, Calling a Wolf a Wolf

“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.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Calling a Wolf a Wolf

“I'm learning how much of myself I don't actually need”
― Kaveh Akbar, Calling a Wolf a Wolf

“When I awake, I ask God to slide into my head quickly before I do”
― Kaveh Akbar, Calling a Wolf a Wolf

“Here I am, dying at an average pace.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Calling a Wolf a Wolf

“Will I ever even know when my work is done? I'm almost ready to show you the mess I've made”
― Kaveh Akbar, Calling a Wolf a Wolf

“Sometimes a mind is ready to leave the world before its body”
― Kaveh Akbar, Calling a Wolf a Wolf

“my body burned like a barnful of feathers nothing was on fire but fire was on everything”
― Kaveh Akbar, Calling a Wolf a Wolf

“That the moon causes tides seems too witchy to be science”
― Kaveh Akbar, Calling a Wolf a Wolf

“Much of being alive is breaking”
― Kaveh Akbar, Calling a Wolf a Wolf

“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, Calling a Wolf a Wolf

“...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”
― Kaveh Akbar, Calling a Wolf a Wolf

“Sometimes I feel beautiful and near dying”
― Kaveh Akbar, Calling a Wolf a Wolf

“The barbarism of eating anything seems almost unbearable”
― Kaveh Akbar, Calling a Wolf a Wolf

“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, Calling a Wolf a Wolf

“Performed pain is still pain”
― Kaveh Akbar, Calling a Wolf a Wolf

“If you teach me something beautiful I will name it quickly before it floats away”
― Kaveh Akbar, Calling a Wolf a Wolf

“Now it's lonely all over”
― Kaveh Akbar, Calling a Wolf a Wolf

“This makes sadness seem more like tradition”
― Kaveh Akbar, Calling a Wolf a Wolf

“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?”
― Kaveh Akbar, Calling a Wolf a Wolf

“One way to live a life is to spend each moment asking for forgiveness for the last”
― Kaveh Akbar, Calling a Wolf a Wolf

“All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Calling a Wolf a Wolf