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

“when you fall asleep in that sort of love you wake up with bruises on your neck”
― 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 I awake, I ask God to slide into my head quickly before I do”
― 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

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

“Here I am, dying at an average pace.”
― 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

“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

“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

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

“This makes sadness seem more like tradition”
― 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

“...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

“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

“the addictions that were killing me fastest were the ones I loved best”
― Kaveh Akbar, Calling a Wolf a Wolf

“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.”
― 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

“It's difficult to be anything at all with the whole world right here for the having”
― Kaveh Akbar, Calling a Wolf a Wolf