They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us
Hanif Abdurraqib
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Home is where the heart begins, but not where the heart stays.”
“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.”
“No matter how obsessed you've been with your own vanishing, there will always be someone who wants you whole.”
“The thing about grief is that it never truly leaves. From the moment it enters you, it becomes something you are always getting over.”
“A person is a whole person when they are good sometimes but not always, and loved by someone regardless.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
Except where otherwise noted, all rights reserved to the author(s) of this book (mentioned above). The content of this page serves solely as promotional material for the aforementioned book. If you enjoyed these quotes, you can support the author(s) by acquiring the full book from Amazon.
Book Keywords:
nonfiction, racism, essay, music, poetry, columbus
