Hanif Abdurraqib Quotes

Here, we are saying that we will tear your country apart, we will give birth to the terror within, and then we will leave you to drown in it.

And What Good Will Your Vanity Be When The Rapture Comes"

says the man with a cart of empty bottles at the corner of church
and lincoln while I stare into my phone and I say
I know oh I know while trying to find the specific
filter that will make the sun's near-flawless descent look

the way I might describe it in a poem and the man
says the moment is already right in front of you and I
say I know but everyone I love is not here and I mean
here like on this street corner with me while I turn

the sky a darker shade of red on my phone and I mean
here like everyone I love who I can still touch and not
pass my fingers through like the wind in a dream
but I look up at the man and he is a kaleidoscope

of shadows I mean his shadows have shadows
and they are small and trailing behind him and I know
then that everyone he loves is also not here and the man doesn't ask
but I still say hey man I've got nothing I've got nothing even though I have plenty

to go home to and the sun is still hot even in its
endless flirt with submission and the man's palm has a small
river inside I mean he has taken my hand now and here we are
tethered and unmoving and the man says what color are you making

the sky and I say what I might say in a poem I say all surrender
ends in blood and he says what color are you making the sky and
I say something bright enoug

It is one thing to be good at what you do, and it is another thing to be good and bold enough to have fun while doing it.

There is a way to read a poem, and then there is a way to allow the poem to exit the body and be read by everyone in the room.

No matter how obsessed you've been with your own vanishing, there will always be someone who wants you whole.

I know that I stopped thinking about extreme grief as the sole vehicle for great art when the grief started to take people with it. And I get it. The tortured artist is the artist that gets remembered for all time, particularly if they if they either perish or overcome. But the truth is that so many of us are stuck in the middle. So many of us begin tortured and end tortured, with only brief bursts of light in between, and I'd rather have average art and survival than miracles that come at the cost of someone's life.

It's in the spirit of male loneliness to imagine that someone has to suffer for it.

But I mostly thought about how perhaps I owned nothing. Not even my own hands, pressed behind my back.

THE GHOST OF THE AUTHOR'S MOTHER HAS A CONVERSATION WITH HIS FIANCÉE ABOUT HIGHWAYS

...and down south, honey. When the side of the road began to swell with dead and dying things, that's when us black children knew it was summer. Daddy didn't keep clocks in the house. Ain't no use when the sky round those parts always had some flames runnin' to horizon, lookin' like the sun was always out. back when I was a little girl, I swear, them white folk down south would do anything to stop another dark thing from touching the land, even the nighttime. We ain't have streetlights, or some grandmotherly voice riding through the fields on horseback tellin' us when to come inside. What we had was the stomach of a deer, split open on route 59. What we had was flies resting on the exposed insides of animals with their tongues touching the pavement. What we had was the smell of gunpowder and the promise of more to come, and, child, that'll get you home before the old folks would break out the moonshine and celebrate another day they didn't have to pull the body of someone they loved from the river. I say 'river' because I want you to always be able to look at the trees without crying. When we moved east, I learned how a night sky can cup a black girl in its hands and ask for forgiveness. My daddy sold the pistol he kept in the sock drawer and took me to the park. Those days, I used to ask him what he feared, and he always said "the bottom of a good glass." And then he stopped answer

There is no moment in America when I do not feel like I am fighting. When I do not feel like I'm pushing back against a machine that asks me to prove that I belong here.

A person only gets to be called a widow once, and then they are simply lonely. The bluest period.

There is something about setting eyes on the people who hold you up instead of imagining them.

It is a luxury to see some violence as terror and other violence as necessary.

Home is where the heart begins, but not where the heart stays.

Sometimes it isn't what we're battling that takes us, but simply the battle itself.

A person is a whole person when they are good sometimes but not always, and loved by someone regardless.

I have remained here because of my comfort with the darkness I know and my fear of the darkness I do not.

I don't fear what the future holds as much as I fear not being being alive to see it.

We make our own music to celebrate our dead where we must.

I stopped thinking about extreme grief as the sole vehicle for great art when the grief started to take people with it.

There are few sins greater than the ones we commit against ourselves in the name of others. The things that push us further away from who we are, and closer to the image people demand.

The thing about grief is that it never truly leaves. From the moment it enters you, it becomes something you are always getting over.

Staying is not always a choice, and I have lived and lost enough to know that. But the way I think about grief is that it is the great tug-of-war, and sometimes the flag is on the side you don't want it to be on. And sometimes, the game has exhausted all of its joy, and all that's left is you on your knees. But, today, even though I am sad, my hands are still on the rope.