Tesia

“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

“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

“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

“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