Pilgrim Bell Quotes

“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.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Pilgrim Bell: Poems

“Wrath is the desire
to repay what you've suffered.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Pilgrim Bell: Poems

“Every person I’ve ever met. Has been small enough. To fit. In my eye.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Pilgrim Bell: Poems

“It is pretty to be sweet
and full of pardon like
a flower perfuming the
hands that shred it, but
all piety leads to a single
point: the same paradise
where dead lab rats go.

If you live small you’ll be resurrected with the
small, a whole planet
of minor gods simpering
in the weeds.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Pilgrim Bell: Poems

“The reward for goodness is just more goodness and sometimes not even that.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Pilgrim Bell: Poems

“At his elementary school in an American suburb,
a boy's shirt says: "We Did It to Hiroshima, We Can Do It to Tehran!”
― Kaveh Akbar, Pilgrim Bell: Poems

“On first
inspecting Adam, the devil entered his lips.
Watch: the devil enters Adam’s lips,
crawls through his throat, through his guts
to nally emerge out his anus.
He’s all hollow! the devil giggles.
He knows his job will be easy, a human just one long
desperation to be fi lled.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Pilgrim Bell: Poems

“Whatever I learn makes me angry to have learned it.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Pilgrim Bell: Poems