The Crown Ain't Worth Much Quotes

“You may ask why I allow my face to drown in less and less joy with each passing year and I will say I just woke up one day and I was a still photo in everyone else's home but my own. or I will say I promise that my legs just need another season, and then I will be who you fell in love with again. and then probably just I'm sorry that there was once a tremendous blue sky and then a decade of hard, incessant rain.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, The Crown Ain't Worth Much

“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 answering. And then he stopped coming home altogether.

Something about the first day of a season, honey. Something always gotta sacrifice its blood. Everything that has its time must be lifted from the earth. My boys don't bother with seasons anymore. My sons went to sleep in the spring once and woke up to a motherless summer. All they know now is that it always be colder than it should be. I wish I could fix this for you. I'm sorry none of my children wear suits anymore. I wish ties didn't remind my boys of shovels, and dirt, and an empty living room. They all used to look so nice in ties. I'm sorry that you may come home one day to the smell of rotting meat, every calendar you own, torn off the walls, burning in a trashcan.

And it will be the end of spring.
And you will know.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, The Crown Ain't Worth Much

“I am so sorry that you have nowhere to sit. I just loved someone yesterday. so you see the dilemma. I just promised someone that I would watch them grow old in a country that wants them dead.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, The Crown Ain't Worth Much

“I think I am starting to vanish slowly from head to toe. There are ten different ways to say sunset. The bartender says my face is wearing all of them.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, The Crown Ain't Worth Much

“A piano can coax even the most vicious of ghosts out of a body”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, The Crown Ain't Worth Much

“XII No one wants to be the person who drives slow past a flower shop on valentine’s day while their lover sleeps even if I know the flower petals will fold in on themselves and turn to rust before they expand into the sun beautiful things die every day and we still stare while they are living or set them in the middle of a wooden table passed down from a wilting grandmother who only remembers your face on tuesdays it makes sense to declare love with something that makes no promises about how long it will stay living something that we know will be dead in a week I tell myself that while gently pressing my fingers into the dark leather of another pair of sneakers while all of the other men scramble for chocolate I try on another beautiful thing that may live to see me forgiven for walking through the door holding it close to my chest nothing else in my hands I understand that I should always come bearing flowers it is good to hold a slow funeral in your palms it is good to know when something will leave”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, The Crown Ain't Worth Much

“I only have this one mouth.
I cannot make it into a graveyard for you anymore.
I just learned how to make room under my tongue for the name of someone who loves me.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, The Crown Ain't Worth Much

“I wonder if this is how our parents see us now promising gifts birthed & pulled from a loving shell only to grow into another disaster uninvited & spreading itself along the streets with a slow crawl”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, The Crown Ain't Worth Much

“nothing knows the sound of abandonment like a highway does, not even God.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, The Crown Ain't Worth Much

“and isn’t that what we’ve always been fed? that it is just like the nighttime to rename everything that moves into a monster?”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, The Crown Ain't Worth Much

“Dearest,
I feel certain I am going mad again.
we will go through terrible times. And recover. I
begin to hear your voice, and can’t concentrate. So I am
doing what seems
will give me the greatest possible happiness.
I don’t think two people could have been happier with
this disease. I know
that without you I can’t properly feel.
What I want to say is You have
saved me.

Everything has gone from me

but the certainly of your goodness.

— Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib, “The Author Writes the First Draft of His Wedding Vows,” an erasure of Virginia Woolf’s suicide letter to her husband, Leonard, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much (Button Poetry July 19, 2016)”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, The Crown Ain't Worth Much

“I’m not exactly sure which wound is the one I belong to I mean the only way I recognize my skin is when it is open

and spilling how can I even keep track you know it must be nice to wrap your hands around an unscarred body it must be nice to wrap your tongue around all of the words in that song without also asking to bleed out on a sidewalk look all I know is I began running when the fire started and I haven’t stopped since

maybe I come from running maybe running is a country maybe everyone who lives there misses someone they thought would live forever”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, The Crown Ain't Worth Much

“I’m not exactly sure which wound is the one I belong to I mean
the only way I recognize my skin is when it is
open
and spilling how can I even keep track you know it must be
nice to wrap your hands around an unscarred body it must
be nice to wrap your tongue around all of the words in that
song without also asking to bleed out on a sidewalk look all
I know is
I began running when the fire started and I haven’t stopped
since maybe I come from running maybe running is a
country maybe everyone who lives there misses someone
they thought would live forever”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, The Crown Ain't Worth Much

“it makes sense to declare love with something that makes no promises about how long it will stay living”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, The Crown Ain't Worth Much

“The girl on TV is no older than I was when everyone in my quivering home learned to hustle one more ghost into our already overflowing pockets & even though it is not real, she is being swallowed by a carnivorous grief that is howling & escaping through the screen on all fours, pacing around at our feet & begging us to move.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, The Crown Ain't Worth Much

“I say Mike and a cardinal lands on my shoulder. I say Trayvon and a rainbow stretches over a city where it doesn't rain. I say Sandra and an new tree grows in my fathers front yard.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, The Crown Ain't Worth Much

“People have to mourn the shatter of anything that they can look into and see how alive they still are”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, The Crown Ain't Worth Much

“I look up and ask myself again why the stars have so long tolerated the audacity of clouds”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, The Crown Ain't Worth Much

“because I guess anything can be a gun if the darkness surrounding it is hungry enough or at least that’s what I’ve been told when the bodies of black boys thrash against what little life they have left tethering them to the earth and isn’t that what we’ve always been fed? that it is just like the nighttime to rename everything that moves into a monster?”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, The Crown Ain't Worth Much