They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us Quotes
"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."
"This is about hope, sure, but not in the way that it is often packaged as an antithesis to that which is burning."
"Joy, or the concept of joy, is often toothless and vague because it needs to be."
"Sometimes what we need is something to make the grief seem small, even when you know it’s a lie."
"Chance The Rapper has probably been to church more recently than I have, or at least he understands the gospel better than I ever will."
"The soundtrack to grief isn’t always as dark as the grief itself."
"There is something about the way Chance takes up space that causes these types of intense reactions."
"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."
"Watching people younger and more carefree than I am now spill toward any space Chance is standing in unlocks the part of me that once did the same thing for Kanye West or Lupe Fiasco."
"To watch the casual packaging of a violence that impacts and affects bodies that look like yours, and to watch that violence knowing that you have no place in it, other than to take it in, feels similar to being black every other place in America."
"It’s in the spirit of male loneliness to imagine that someone has to suffer for it."
"The problem is the one of the notebook becoming public, sung to thousands."
"Life, if anything, is too long. We accumulate too much along the way."
"It is so easy to be hopeful in the daytime when you can see the things you wish on. But it was night, it stayed night. Night was striding across nothingness with the whole round world in his hands." —Zora Neale Hurston
"So fake your death Or it’s your blame / And leave the lights on When you stay" —My Chemical Romance, "Fake Your Death"
"I am sad today, and I may be sad tomorrow. But I will be here, looking for a way out, every time."
"But the truth is that so many of us are stuck in the middle."
"I am not afraid to keep on living / I am not afraid to walk this world alone"
"The only thing I haven’t done yet is die / and it’s me and my plus-one at the afterlife."
"You can put a murderer in a suit, and he’s still a murderer." —Allen Iverson
"It was something that some would say I shouldn’t have been watching—a plain type of evil, the type that cannot be disputed or softened."
"Once you understand violence, once its presence is constant enough, it can become something you survive until survival becomes normalcy, and fear becomes something you lie about when your friends are listening."
"Even as a boy, I had lived long enough to understand that the person we think shouldn’t die is the one who, of course, sometimes dies."
"I always wanted more for Doughboy himself."
"Ice Cube has, for years, spoken to various levels of black sanctuary with anger, humor, and emotion."
"The black song that sits in the movement has often been a reflection of black people in America, hope rooted in a reliance on faith, but still so often looking over its shoulder, checking for an exit."
"The link between black music and black survival shows up most urgently when the stakes are at their highest."
"I believe all of these to be noble acts. This might seem like hyperbole, but I mean this. I say it with my chest."
"The only answer is to dispose of that which will not save you."
"The thing I love most about sneakers, perhaps the thing that keeps carrying me back to them, is that there is no confidence I have found like that which comes with something on your feet that you can believe in."
"A way to show the dead that we’ll be all right, that we can go on without them just fine."
"I’d like to tell her about the summer of 1997 while someone sits behind us and plays a horn, slow and beautiful."
"I’d like to tell her that I played basketball late into the night that summer, with the words to that song fresh on my tongue."
"You should’ve seen me, I’d tell her in our new and clean heaven. You should’ve seen me."
"The Wales Window depicts a black Christ with his arms outstretched, his right arm pushing away injustice, his left arm extended in an offering of forgiveness."
"I don’t know what a community does when it has no more forgiveness left, or when it knows what forgiveness in this age truly means."
"Our country’s national crime is lynching. It is not the creature of an hour, the sudden outburst of uncontrolled fury, or the unspeakable brutality of an insane mob." —Ida B. Wells
"What makes the dead body worthwhile is that it was once living."
"The distance between curiosity and fear is tragically short."
"The greatest emotional impact on Americans toward American Muslims is that it took curiosity out of the timeline. There was now only fear, turning rapidly to anger."
"The Southern Black church has always been a battleground in this history of violence."
"Survival is truly a language in which the Black matriarch is fluent."
"What I got to experience in moving to the Northeast after living my entire life in the Midwest is the different masks that racism wears."
"The state is going to kill Dylann Roof, and my desire for his death has long passed. I don’t want him to die unless he can, somehow, carry the insidious spirit of his motivations, which rest deep inside of America’s architecture."
"Rap is the genre of music that least allows for its artists to comfortably revel in fiction."
"I am afraid and do not know what is coming next, but I am almost certain it will not be all good."
"Expressive and detailed anger is a luxury."
"The genre was ready for a white rapper again, after the mid- ’90s didn’t provide much in the way of white rappers that could be taken seriously in the mainstream."
"Listening to Eminem was like watching my white friend Adam cuss out his parents in broad daylight."
"The funny thing about Eminem is that me and my crew fucked with him because he talked that reckless shit like the white boys we’d known from a few blocks over who would scream at their mothers."
"The joke is that MC Serch and Pete Nice are also white."
"The real grief is silence in a place where there was once noise."
"I love him most when he isn’t taking himself seriously, but I think he is at his most comfortable when he’s taking himself seriously."
"The ultimate white rapper joke is the white rapper who never wanted to be as famous as he ended up being, but couldn’t help having it happen due to his country’s endless desire for a white face to save everything."
"My heroes are the backpack MCs who made a lane for white rappers to hone their skills enough to get record deals, leaving them behind in the process."
"Sometimes, it is the body of the person holding it, or the direction that they choose to point it in."
"We all have a right to keep the people we love safe."
"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."