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“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: Essays

“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: Essays

“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: Essays