Top 80 Hanif Abdurraqib Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

53. “When someone loves loudly, with everything they have in them, the withholding of that loud love, even briefly, feels impossible to endure.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

54. “I am so sorry that you have nowhere to sit. I just loved someone yesterday. so you see the dilemma. I just promised someone that I would watch them grow old in a country that wants them dead.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

55. “No one decides when the people we love are actually gone. May we all be buried on our own terms.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

56. “History, both the arm holding down the drowning body and the voice claiming the water is holy.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

57. “And so it can be said that rap became political when the people making it needed it to be fed, and it became dangerous when those people being fed realized they had the power to feed themselves forever off the power they had.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

58. “There is not enough distance between tragedies for my sadness to mature into anything else but another new monument obscuring the last new monument.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

59. “The fundamental flaw, of course, is in this: proving to the public that someone did not deserve to die, or did not deserve the violence that chased them down. It is the worst instinct, and one that I fight against often, when I want to clear the name of someone dead who lived a life that was undoubtedly sometimes good and sometimes bad but always a life nonetheless. At.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

60. “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.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

61. “I define loneliness by the way the water between my brother and I grows, and becomes more treacherous.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

62. “My boys and I find a corner booth and I play ‘Can It Be All So Simple’ because I’m feeling nostalgic for a very particular brand of Wu-Tang Clan, and this is it. One of those Wu songs that really isn’t about anything other than the fact that none of us can be as we were when we were young. That a great deal of us have seen too much or heard too much or lived through too much to wrestle our innocence back from whatever cynicism or heartbreak has grown in its place.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

63. “It is a luxury to be able to fetishize violence, especially the violence that you inflict upon others.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

64. “We found some dive in some district of one of those cities that began to give gentrified areas pretty names to distract from the upheaval of the people who were there before.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

65. “I understand more clearly now what I didn’t understand then: how The Low End Theory isn’t only about that which cannot be heard, but it is also about society’s unseen, the people who exist but may be able to navigate an entire landscape as invisible, until some violence or some tragedy deems them less so.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

66. “We are nothing without our quick and simple blessings, without those willing to drag optimism by its neck to the gates of grief and ask to be let in, an entire choir of voices singing at their back.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

67. “It is a strange miracle to be able to trace your own aging, your own mortality through someone who’s living alongside you, someone who has survived eras at the same time as you have in some of the same places.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

68. “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.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

69. “I propose, once again, that you are, in part, who loves you. Who might step outside of themselves to find whatever will heal you, return you to a place where you are loved.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

70. “A person only gets to be called a widow once, and then they are simply lonely. The bluest period.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

71. “No matter what comes out of a person in these times, the work that we make when we feel like we no longer want to be alive is not the best work if it is also not work that, little by little, is pushing us back toward perhaps staying, even if just for a moment.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

72. “I do not waste time or language on our enemies, beloved. But if I ever did, I would tell them that there is a river between what they see and what they know. And they don’t have the heart to cross it.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

73. “I’m not especially easy to fool, but I am a romantic, which I suppose means at the right hour, I’m everybody’s fool.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

74. “Forgive me, for I have been nurturing my well-worn grudges against beauty.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

75. “The problem with Gym Class Heroes, and Travis McCoy particularly, is that they were outside of the current era of black weirdness that has been accepted in more mainstream spaces as a type of visible and understood blackness.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

76. “I think I am starting to vanish slowly from head to toe. There are ten different ways to say sunset. The bartender says my face is wearing all of them.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

77. “I love the homecoming because I have known what it is to leave. I have seen the city I love from the sky just as I have seen the city I love from the cracks in between metal bars. Cherish the homecoming, because you know what lasts forever and what does not.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

78. “A piano can coax even the most vicious of ghosts out of a body.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

79. “If you know you’re good, an opponent is a temporary roadblock, something to be taken apart and moved out of your way.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

80. “Sometimes, that which does not kill you sits heavy over you until all of the things that did not kill you turn into a single counterforce that might. No matter what comes out of a person in these times, the work that we make when we feel like we no longer want to be alive is not the best work if it is also not work that, little by little, is pushing us back toward perhaps staying, even if just for a moment.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

81. “With enough repetition, anything can become a religion. It doesn’t matter if it works or not, it simply matters if a person returns.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

82. “It is a luxury to romanticize blood, especially your own. It is a luxury to be able to fetishize violence, especially the violence that you inflict upon others. To use it as a bond, or to call it church, or to build an identity around it while knowing that everyone you can send home bloody will not come back for revenge.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

83. “Anger is a type of geography. The ways out of it expand the more you love a person. The more forgiveness you might be willing to afford each other opens up new and unexpected roads. And so, for some, staying angry at someone you love is a reasonable option. To stay angry at someone you know will forgive your anger is a type of love, or at least it is a type of familiarity that can feel like love.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

84. “I love the dead because we cannot let each other down anymore. I cannot fail you. I am thankful for a leaving that is permanent. It is one thing to be haunted by a life gone and another to be haunted by a life that spins on, happily, without you.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

85. “Convenience is also mistaken for something a little bit like love, or a lot like love, depending on what is at stake, and what part of a life is being made easier.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

86. “Heartbreak itself is a primary color. Stagnant without a series of secondary colors to activate it. Longing is an activator.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib