A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance
Hanif Abdurraqib
Top 10 Best Quotes
“History, both the arm holding down the drowning body and the voice claiming the water is holy.”
“I’ve run out of language to explain the avalanche of anguish I feel when faced with this world, and so if I can’t make sense of this planet, I’m better off imagining another.”
“If I am going to be afraid, I might as well do it honest. Arm in arm with everyone I love, adorned in blood and bruises, singing jokes on our way to the grave.”
“I have fallen so in love with the leaves, who do the duty of making their death beautiful, bursting from otherwise unremarkable branches before the cold browns them and grinds them to dust.”
“When someone loves loudly, with everything they have in them, the withholding of that loud love, even briefly, feels impossible to endure.”
“It occurs to me now that this was the real joy of dancing: to enter a world unlike the one you find yourself burdened with, and move your body toward nothing but a prayer that time might slow down.”
“I have grown weary of talking about life as if it is deserved, or earned, or gifted, or wasted. I'm going to be honest about my scoreboard and just say that the math on me being here and the people who have kept me here doesn't add up when weighed against the person I've been and the person I can still be sometimes. But isn't that the entire point of gratitude? To have a relentless understanding of all the ways you could have vanished, but haven't? The possibilities for my exits have been endless, and so the gratitude for my staying must be equally endless. I am sorry that this one is not about movement, or history, or dance. But instead about stillness. About all of the frozen moments that I have been pulled back from, in service of attempting another day.”
“And I think this is how I would most like to imagine romance, friends, or should I say lovers. In praise of all my body can and cannot do, I wish to figure out how it can best sing with all of yours for a moment in a room where the walls sweat. I wish to lock eyes across a dance floor from you while something our mothers sang in the kitchen plays over the speakers. I want us to find each other among the forest of writhing and make a deal. Okay, lover. It is just us now. The only way out is through.”
“One way trauma can impact us is by the way it makes us consider a polite proximity to violence and oppression as comfort.”
“I have wanted to die enough times in my life to understand the idea that wanting to die is not a foolish thing... I don't mean to prop up the idea of wanting an exit, but for me, not to imagine it as a foolish means that I am, by default, tasked with taking it seriously. I can't life as I once did, telling people that I was doing fine and desperately wanting them to wade through the language and see that I was in pain.”
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Book Keywords:
mothers-love, equity-and-justice, friendship, equity, death, love, existentialism, family, honesty, reflection, life, suicide
