Favorite Quotes from There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension by Hanif Abdurraqib

“But the commitment to praying is the work. I was first told that prayer was a ritual, and the ritual was the reward. Anything born out of the ritual that would otherwise flow into my living was simply a bonus.” (p. 111)

“Anything I wanted to do, I could do now. It was still the middle of April, and I had enough money for one more month of rent, and by that time I’d have something newer and better figured out. I was a hustler, after all. I’d come up around hustlers. There were no circumstances that I believed I couldn’t hustle my way out of when the time came. Fuck the noise, it was going to be a good summer. A summer where I wouldn’t have to pray my way out of any fresh terror.” (p. 115)

“A team is losing until it isn’t. Until an architect of the miraculous takes over a game, and the deception becomes real. This is really happening. All of the good you believed would arrive, suddenly has. All of the bad that is coming, certainly will.” (p. 128)

“With enough repetition, anything can become a religion. It doesn’t matter if it works or not, it simply matters that a person returns.” (p. 153)

“I have, myself, insisted upon someone being dead to me as a coat of armor. It makes it easier to turn the picture frames on their faces, to lock the ephemera in a drawer.” (p. 198)

“It was good, for a moment, to watch people, a place, a team fight to come to terms with that reality and then eventually make peace with it, which is probably easier to do when the stakes are a game and not a life, or a place to sleep, or a person you love walking back through a door they walked out of. A ball goes in, or it doesn’t” (p. 223)

“Even when I am not an underdog in the least, even when everyone believes in me or, at worst, no one gives a fuck about my movements either way., I can convince myself that I am an underdog. The same shit that had Jalen Rose in Chris Webber’s grill, popping off during a game they were winning in a season they were dominating. Don’t let a motherfucker see you sweat, even for a little bit.” (p. 285)

“And this is why, in Ohio, so few people I know turned away from the Cleveland Cavaliers, even when it looked bleak at the end of Game 4, when it seemed like this would be another disappointment. But what if it wasn’t? What if it is most comfortable against the ropes? The bruised and weary fighter grinning in the face of the juggernaut, too arrogant to realize that it was always a trap.” (p. 287)

“History might not ascribe the same gravity to every champion who has ever eon anything, but history is hell on so many of us, and I am feeling generous, today and always. I have felt like a champion before, even having won nothing but the desire to be alive in a day I woke up not wanting to be alive in. I deserve something for that, even if it is a parade of my own making.” (p. 287)

“And so we stay, one way or another. We never make it out, and we never disappear. Permanence is the greatest stunt of them all.” (p. 315)