They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us Quotes

“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.”
― Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

“No matter how obsessed you've been with your own vanishing, there will always be someone who wants you whole.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

“It’s easy to convince people that you are really okay if they don’t have to actually hear what rattles you in the private silence of your own making.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

“Home is where the heart begins, but not where the heart stays.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

“A person is a whole person when they are good sometimes but not always, and loved by someone regardless.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

“The thing about grief is that it never truly leaves. From the moment it enters you, it becomes something you are always getting over.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

“Hasn’t that always been the way of it? We all choose our sins, and their measure. The ones we believe will render us unforgivable, and the ones that we will wash off with a morning prayer.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

“I have been thinking, then, about the value of optimism while cities burn, while people are fearing for their lives and the lives of their loved ones, while discourse is reduced to laughing through a chorus of anxiety. A woman in a Cape Cod diner the day after Christmas saw me eyeing the news and shaking my head. She told me that “things will get better,” and I wasn’t sure they would, but I nodded and said, “They surely can’t get any worse,” which is the lie that we all tell, the one that we want to believe, even as there are jaws opening before us.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

“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.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

“The truth is, if we don’t write our own stories, there is someone else waiting to do it for us. And those people, waiting with their pens, often don’t look like we do and don’t have our best interests in mind.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

“It's in the spirit of male loneliness to imagine that someone has to suffer for it.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

“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.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

“It is jarring, what we let fear do to each other; how we invent enemies and then make them so small that we are fine with wishing them dead. How we decide what “safety” is, how ours is only ours and must be gained at all costs. How we take that long coat of fear and throw it around the shoulders of anyone who doesn’t look like us, or prays to another God.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

“It is a luxury to see some violence as terror and other violence as necessary.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

“The truth is, once you understand that there are people who do not want you to exist, that is a difficult card to remove from the table. There is no liberation, no undoing that knowledge. It is the unyielding door, the one that simply cannot be pushed back against any longer. For many, there are reminders of this every day, every hour. It makes "Alright," the emotional bar and the song itself, the best there is. It makes existence itself a celebration.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

“Sometimes it isn't what we're battling that takes us, but simply the battle itself.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

“I have remained here because of my comfort with the darkness I know and my fear of the darkness I do not.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

“I stopped thinking about extreme grief as the sole vehicle for great art when the grief started to take people with it.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

“Sometimes, that which does not kill you sits heavy over you until all of the things that did not kill you turn into a single counterforce that might. No matter what comes out of a person in these times, the work that we make when we feel like we no longer want to be alive is not the best work if it is also not work that, little by little, is pushing us back toward perhaps staying, even if just for a moment.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

“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.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

“It is true, yes, that joy in a violent world can be rebellion. Sex can be rebellion. Turning off the news and watching two hours of a mindless action film can be rebellion. But without being coupled with any actual HARD rebellion, without reaching our hands into revolutionary action, all you’ve done is had a pretty fun day of joy, sex, and a movie.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

“There is something about setting eyes on the people who hold you up instead of imagining them.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

“A person is a whole person when they are good sometimes but not always, and loved by someone regardless. I love the people where I'm from because they would fight to humanize me if I died violently on film. We would do this for each other, despite anything in our pasts, because no one else would do it for us. We know that we are more than only good and only bad, despite what happens to the names of the dead after they are no longer around to speak them.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

“I don't fear what the future holds as much as I fear not being being alive to see it.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

“We make our own music to celebrate our dead where we must.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

“We are nothing without our quick and simple blessings, without those willing to drag optimism by its neck to the gates of grief and ask to be let in, an entire choir of voices singing at their back.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

“America, so frequently, is excited about the stories of black people, but not the black people themselves.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

“No matter how obsessed you've been with your own vanishing, there will always be someone who wants you whole.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

“We all choose our sins, and their measure. The ones we believe will render us unforgivable, and the ones that we will wash off with a morning prayer.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

“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.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us