There's Always This Year Quotes

“I propose, once again, that you are, in part, who loves you. Who might step outside of themselves to find whatever will heal you, return you to a place where you are loved.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

“I'm not especially easy to fool, but I am a romantic, which I suppose means at the right hour, I'm everybody's fool.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

“I mean that we must figure out, together, what we are willing to lie about for the sake of a clean memory. The story ends with no sinners, because it must. Everyone is washed clean. A city holds its breath for decades, waiting for something good to descend, and then it does. This, I believe, means that everything resets, and so does everyone within the container of this glorious happening. To enter the church of triumph, everyone must be absolved, and so everyone is. The pistols vanish from the waistbands of cops, from the sock drawers of dealers. What you thought to be blood, dried on the concrete of the park, is instead handprints left by children who pressed their hands into dark paint and left behind a symbol of their living. Yes, living, the children are alive, even the ones thought to be dead. Even the ones who were on the news, even the ones some of us marched in the streets for and broke glass windows for and threw ourselves into police shields for. In the end of this story, there are tattoos that vanish from the skin of those who got the names of the gone-too-soon inked on them, because no one is gone too soon. Yes, if we are to cure ourselves of curses, let us cure ourselves of all the curses tonight, let the lake cough its thick fog upon the people and let them be unmoved by the sweat. What is sweat but decoration, jewelry upon the extended arms beckoning people toward a revival?”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

“Death isn't the only way to die, though it can be argued that it is the most merciful.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

“With enough repetition, anything can become a religion. It doesn’t matter if it works or not, it simply matters if a person returns.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

“I love the homecoming because I have known what it is to leave. I have seen the city I love from the sky just as I have seen the city I love from the cracks in between metal bars. Cherish the homecoming, because you know what lasts forever and what does not.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

“Convenience is also mistaken for something a little bit like love, or a lot like love, depending on what is at stake, and what part of a life is being made easier.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

“Heartbreak itself is a primary color. Stagnant without a series of secondary colors to activate it. Longing is an activator.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

“It is a strange miracle to be able to trace your own aging, your own mortality through someone who's living alongside you, someone who has survived eras at the same time as you have in some of the same places.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

“I do not waste time or language on our enemies, beloved. But if I ever did, I would tell them that there is a river between what they see and what they know. And they don’t have the heart to cross it.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

“It is romantic to be cursed, to feel like the world has it out for you. That there is a deity bored enough to disrupt your ecstasy.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

“I know of no good fortune that I haven’t had to chase. The bad fortunes are going to show up whenever they want, whether you invite them or not.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

“Tough for me to tell a difference between a prayer and a wish, though some might say a prayer is simply a wish that punches above its weight, a wish that leaves the lips and, depending on how it's spoken [...] either gains wings or falls on the ears of the living. [...] This paper thin difference defines itself by the cracks through which blood can exit. With enough ferocity we are told that a prayer ends in mercy.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

“If there is a heaven, I suppose there we can weep over the scrapbook of our lives while we wait for the living to climb the constellations.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

“I love the dead because we cannot let each other down anymore. I cannot fail you. I am thankful for a leaving that is permanent. It is one thing to be haunted by a life gone and another to be haunted by a life that spins on, happily, without you.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

“It is impossible to believe that any of us ever looked like children. I understand, of course, that we were once children. The cloak of time has yet to grow so long that I have surrendered my childhood.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

“Yes, Lord, I am thankful today again for every reminder of how I have outlived my worst imagination. I will walk slowly through the garden of all that could have killed me but didn’t.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

“If you know you’re good, an opponent is a temporary roadblock, something to be taken apart and moved out of your way.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

“In returning to the gospel of James, the hair (or even lack thereof) does do the talking, and it has been true for me that black hair talks in a language that is entirely its own, and a language that not all here can achieve – even among the multitudes of black folks, some hair can speak in a manner that other hair might not be afforded. Even among kin, even among siblings. But when it speaks well, there is nothing else that needs to be said to it or about it, although if I know my folks, I will say that many of us don’t mind heaping praise upon someone who knows they look good, even if they already know it.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

“The hustle is that everyone talks about the “today” as a single day that materialized, untethered, with no connection to any history before it or any history that will come after it. As if a moment is not within a braid of moments that defines a place.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

“It is easiest to measure the distance between where I am and where I want to be in miles, in minutes. It is unfair to measure such distance in heartbreak, in loneliness.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

“What you may learn is that there are places you can go where no one will pay attention to you if you don’t cause a fuss. Sink down into a big chair at the library for a few hours, and hold a book on your lap, and if you fall asleep, no one will be bold enough to wake you up. Spend a dollar or two at the McDonald’s and sit with a newspaper you swiped from the top of a trashcan, and that booth can be your booth for a little while. There is a way to blend into the architecture of a place, as long as you don’t summon any chaos while you do it. Walk through a park where the weight of summer has broken the necks of the sunflowers, sent their faces moaning near the soil they burst from, and imagine that even the flowers must try to make a deal with whoever their god is, hoping for a better result than their current predicament.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

“I have felt like a champion before, even having won nothing but the desire to be alive in a day I woke up not wanting to be alive in. I deserve something for that, even if it is a parade of my own making. An invention, which is all the spoils of winning are anyway. Breathtaking inventions, to be sure. But inventions, nonetheless.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

“Doesn't matter how many stars are built or born on a cramped court, doesn't matter who gets a court or community center named after them. But trust: there are more of us, always. Whole gangs of us. Some of us carved our name into trees, into the wet concrete of new sidewalks. Some of us took knives to metal and wrote our names into the death traps of the playground. And so we stay, one way or another. We never make it out, and we never disappear. Permanence is the greatest stunt of them all.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

“I was first told that prayer was a ritual, and ritual was the reward”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

“I remember feeling like the concrete was opening up and I know this to be nothing but rage I know this to be what comes after swinging wild punches at the air and imagining the faces of your worst demons the cops the politicians who call the places you love war zones the helicopters that won’t let you sleep that claw through the walls and wake up elders and children and goddamn I remember at my feet that blood-stained concrete just split right in half and opened up and I want a whole city underground if it does not love my people I want to bury the new condo developments instead of my people I want to bury the craft breweries and the barcades and the mixed-use helltowers instead of my people I want the statues melted down I want the mothers of murdered children to do it I want the heat to rise from a statue’s vanishing and last for ten summers I don’t want apologies anymore no not this time I want the mayor to walk through a place he called a war zone at night I want people to get real honest with themselves about what war actually is I want the schools to have heat I want the schools to have air I want the riot gear thrown in the river the river that was blue when I was a boy but now leaves brown streaks as it runs away from the city I want the brown river to carry the riot gear to some other hell and I want the babies to stop passing out in school do you hear me I want a whole city under the ground some days but I at least want the rain I at least want something to wash the blood away so that no one who loved him has to and somewhere beyond the blood what I don’t remember is 5:00 when I learned not to run from the cops and I don’t remember when I first ignored that advice.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

“It might be better, I’d suggest, to uncork the misery early. But this surprises no one. I prefer being accelerated to the front row of my undoing. Spare me the slow march.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

“To look back, to give in to the place where fear and curiosity intersect, is to sacrifice the ground you’ve gained. It slows you down, just enough, and also informs your would-be captor that you are thinking about them more than you’re thinking about escape or glory or the open rim. The chase, like the chasedown block, isn’t only about who is afraid and who isn’t, but fear is always what hums underneath.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

“I say I was happier in the past because the pain of the past is a relic. I speak of it but no longer feel it. I do not know what pain is coming, but I know it is coming. 9:18 It is another example of time and distance misaligning. It has been ____ years since I lost someone, but it feels like ____ because I need it to.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

“The seconds after coming to terms with what you thought to be real and what is real are rarely more alarming to me than they are in this mode. There is a video that breaks my heart that you have perhaps seen. A raccoon, overjoyed with the gift of cotton candy, takes its bounty to the water, to wash the food off before consuming it. The raccoon, of course, does not know what any viewer knows. That the ball of sugar will be overtaken by the entry into the water and dissolve into nothing. When this happens, the raccoon becomes frantic and puzzled, feeling around the puddle of water, seeking what was lost, only to be greeted by its own reflection.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension