Top 60 Hanif Abdurraqib Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

2. “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

3. “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

4. “There is a way to read a poem, and then there is a way to allow the poem to exit the body and be read by everyone in the room.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

5. “No matter how obsessed you’ve been with your own vanishing, there will always be someone who wants you whole.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

6. “I believe in writing as one tool to begin society’s slow crawl toward honesty with itself.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

7. “There are few sins greater than the ones we commit against ourselves in the name of others. The things that push us further away from who we are, and closer to the image people demand.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

8. “There are few things like being feared simply due to having a body. There is no way to easily come to terms with this. Those who fear you may wish that you simply make yourself small, if you refuse to disappear. This is how a simple, public space becomes something entirely unpleasant. This is how a place of release and joy becomes something you hold an arm’s length away.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

9. “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.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

10. “The difference between a warning and a threat is all a matter of what you’ve lived through.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

11. “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.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

12. “Sometimes, when you know so much of not having, it is easy to imagine those who do have as exceptionally worry-free.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

13. “The problem is that everyone wants to talk about language entirely independent of any violence that the existence of that language has accumulated over time.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

14. “Home is where the heart begins, but not where the heart stays.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

15. “There is no moment in America when I do not feel like I am fighting. When I do not feel like I’m pushing back against a machine that asks me to prove that I belong here.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

16. “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

17. “The gospel is, in many ways, whatever gets people into the door to receive whatever blessings you have to offer.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

18. “Sometimes it isn’t what we’re battling that takes us, but simply the battle itself.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

19. “The things we do to stay close to the people we think will carry us through an entire lifetime...”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

20. “It seems, Ms. Taylor, that we are nothing if not for our histories, and so much of mine is tied up in the business of ghosts. I don’t want to burden anyone, but I consider anyone who has lost someone my kin, because I think we are all faced with the same central question of how we go on. How we live the life that best reflects the people who aren’t here and are still counting on us.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

21. “When there is nothing to point to as an excuse for distance, the distance looms larger, more difficult to push.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

22. “I am in love with the idea of partnering as a means of survival, or a brief thrill, or a chance to conquer a moment. Even if you and the person you are partnered with part ways walking into the sunlight after exiting a sweaty dance hall, or spinning off-camera after dancing your way down a line of your clapping peers.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

23. “Joy, in these moments, is the sweetest meal that we keep chasing the perfect recipe for, among a world trying to gather all of the ingredients for itself.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

24. “You may ask why I allow my face to drown in less and less joy with each passing year and I will say I just woke up one day and I was a still photo in everyone else’s home but my own. or I will say I promise that my legs just need another season, and then I will be who you fell in love with again. and then probably just I’m sorry that there was once a tremendous blue sky and then a decade of hard, incessant rain.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

25. “One way trauma can impact us is by the way it makes us consider a polite proximity to violence and oppression as comfort.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

26. “The soundtrack to grief isn’t always as dark as the grief itself. Sometimes what we need is something to make the grief seem small, even when you know it’s a lie.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

27. “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 Abdurraqib

28. “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.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

29. “I consider this while the smoke clears, and we watch young Muslims today do what we always watch young Muslims do in these situations. They plead with the world to be spared. They work tirelessly to show their humanity, show us all the acts of good they have done. They tell the world that they are not like the ones who have killed, as if the world itself, awash with blood, deserves this explanation from the innocent. When I see this now, it breaks my heart.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

30. “I think, though, that a natural reaction to black people being murdered on camera is the notion that living black joy becomes a commodity – something that everyone feels like they should be able to consume as a type of relief point.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

31. “America, so frequently, is excited about the stories of black people, but not the black people themselves.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

32. “I think about how often me and the boys I knew and know were taught to love each other through expressions of violence. How, if that is our baseline for love, it might be impossible for us to love anyone well, including ourselves.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

33. “A person is a whole person when they are good sometimes but not always, and loved by someone regardless.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

34. “There is something about setting eyes on the people who hold you up instead of imagining them.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

35. “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

36. “It’s in the spirit of male loneliness to imagine that someone has to suffer for it.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

37. “It is a luxury to see some violence as terror and other violence as necessary.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

38. “I don’t fear what the future holds as much as I fear not being being alive to see it.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

39. “The truth is that I, like so many of you, spent 2016 trying to hold on to what joy I could. I, like so many of you, am now looking to get my joy back, after it ran away to a more deserving land than this one. And maybe this is what it’s like to live in these times: the happiness is fleeting, and so we search for more while the world burns around us.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

40. “The daughter of a black man murdered on camera by police runs an ad for a presidential candidate and white people who support the candidate are so moved by her retelling of life without her father. And I do imagine that it must be something, to be able to decide at what volume, tone, and tenor you will allow black people to enter your life, for praise of for scolding.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

41. “The truth is, once you understand that there are people who do not want you to exist, that is a difficult card to remove from the table. There is no liberation, no undoing that knowledge. It is the unyielding door, the one that simply cannot be pushed back against any longer. For many, there are reminders of this every day, every hour. It makes “Alright,” the emotional bar and the song itself, the best there is. It makes existence itself a celebration.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

42. “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.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

43. “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.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

44. “But I mostly thought about how perhaps I owned nothing. Not even my own hands, pressed behind my back.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

45. “I stopped thinking about extreme grief as the sole vehicle for great art when the grief started to take people with it.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

46. “Staying is not always a choice, and I have lived and lost enough to know that. But the way I think about grief is that it is the great tug-of-war, and sometimes the flag is on the side you don’t want it to be on. And sometimes, the game has exhausted all of its joy, and all that’s left is you on your knees. But, today, even though I am sad, my hands are still on the rope.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

47. “Here, we are saying that we will tear your country apart, we will give birth to the terror within, and then we will leave you to drown in it.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

48. “I have remained here because of my comfort with the darkness I know and my fear of the darkness I do not.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

49. “We make our own music to celebrate our dead where we must.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

50. “And I realized then that this was yet another funeral. I was reminded, once again, that our grief decides when it is done with us.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib