Claudia Rankine Quotes & Sayings

#1. I think music, like writing, can be a mirror. Can turn back onto the listener, the viewer, the reader, an experience that they know but they don't know.

Claudia Rankine

#2. You have a destination that doesn't include acting like this moment isn't inhabitable, hasn't happened before, and the before isn't part of the now as the night darkens and the time shortens between where we are now and where we are going.

Claudia Rankine

#3. People expect black women to be angry, irrationally so, without reason. They think we are animals and we go around like the Wild Things.

Claudia Rankine

#4. I love revising things, because you see how you can get the language to get closer to intention. You know there are three ways to say X thing, but one will say it better than the other two. And in saying it better, it gets you closer to something.

Claudia Rankine

#5. The brightest memory fades faster than the dullest ink.

Claudia Rankine

#6. How difficult is it for one body to feel the injustice wheeled at another? Are the tensions, the recognitions, the disappointments, and the failures that exploded in the riots too foreign?

Claudia Rankine

#7. I don't know about forgiving, but it's an "I'm still here." And it's not just because I have nowhere else to go. It's because I believe in the possibility. I believe in the possibility of another way of being. Let's make other kinds of mistakes; let's be flawed differently.

Claudia Rankine

#8. When you are alone and too tired even to turn on any of your devices, you let yourself linger in a past stacked among your pillows.

Claudia Rankine

#9. How do you keep the black female body present, and how do you own value for something that society won't give value to? It's a question I try to answer through my own life.

Claudia Rankine

#10. channeling his assertion that the less that is communicated the better. Be ambiguous. This type of ambiguity could also be diagnosed as dissociation and would support Serena's claim that she has had to split herself off from herself and create different personae. Now

Claudia Rankine

#11. As African-Americans, that's what's being played fast and loose with, our citizenship. When you have the Trayvon Martins and the Michael Browns being shot and killed, it's because, on a certain level, there is a kind of mutability in the understanding of citizenship around the black body.

Claudia Rankine

#12. That's the bruise in the heart the ice in the heart was meant to ice.

Claudia Rankine

#13. The book, 'Citizen,' begins with daily encounters, little moments, places where language reveals how racism determines how we interact.

Claudia Rankine

#14. Nobody notices, only you've known,
you're not sick, not crazy,
not angry, not sad
It's just this, you're injured.

Claudia Rankine

#15. A lot of people feel that the realm of poetry and the realm of the lyric is personal feeling and should rise above politics, which, in fact, good poetry has never done.

Claudia Rankine

#16. For instance, if you're a black guy and you got pulled over, and you didn't know that any other black men were being pulled over, you would constantly in the back of your head be thinking, "What did I do?" rather than, "I didn't do anything, these are just the conditions I live under."

Claudia Rankine

#17. Yes, and in your mail the apology note appears referring to "our mistake." Apparently your own invisibility is the real problem causing her confusion. This is how the apparatus she propels you into begins to multiply its meaning. What did you say?

Claudia Rankine

#18. -(I)n memory, remorse wraps the self.

Claudia Rankine

#19. Hey you
All our fevered history won't instill insight,
won't turn a body conscious,
won't make that look
in the eyes say yes, though there is nothing
to solve
even as each moment is an answer.

Claudia Rankine

#20. There are two worlds out there - two Americas out there. If you're a white person, there's one way of being a citizen in our country, and if you're a brown or a black body, there's another way of being a citizen, and that way is very close to death. It's very close to the loss of your life.

Claudia Rankine

#21. I also found it funny to think about blackness as the second person. That was just sort of funny. Not the first person, but the second person, the other person.

Claudia Rankine

#22. all in good fun,

Claudia Rankine

#23. The friends I have, and the people whom I admire, are people who have an understanding of the conditions under which we live, and have a humanist sense of the world. If that's lacking in my understanding of a person's negotiation of the world, I can't be close with that person.

Claudia Rankine

#24. And still you are not the guy and still you fit the description because there is only one guy who is always the guy fitting the description.

Claudia Rankine

#25. Sometimes the art pieces I gravitate toward speak to me in terms of narrative, at other times they speak to me in terms of mood.

Claudia Rankine

#26. How our availability, our showing up, our presence, leaves us open to that violence. I think it's a question of language, as it arrives from one body to another. It becomes the thing in between the two bodies.

Claudia Rankine

#27. You want to belong, you want to be here. In interactions with others you're constantly waiting to see that they recognize that you're a human being. That they can feel your heartbeat and you can feel theirs. And that together you will live - you will live together.

Claudia Rankine

#28. And of course you want the days to add up to something more than you came in and out of the sun and drank the potable water of your developed world

Claudia Rankine

#29. Perhaps the most insidious and least understood form of segregation is that of the word.

Claudia Rankine

#30. Zora Neale Hurston's "I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.

Claudia Rankine

#31. Unlike earlier black-power movements that tried to fight or segregate for self-preservation, Black Lives Matter aligns with the dead, continues the mourning, and refuses the forgetting in front of all of us.

Claudia Rankine

#32. I'm not comfortable, for myself and for others. And yet, one has these people whom you trust, have faith in, whom you believe see what you see, and then you come up against a moment where you feel suddenly tossed out. So I was really interested in those moments.

Claudia Rankine

#33. You become a role model because of what you do as a person. There's a certain point where being a role model might come from standing up for yourself and getting rid of emotion that doesn't belong to you, emotion that is being brought on because of racist actions of others.

Claudia Rankine

#34. The man doesn't acknowledge you as you sit down because the man knows more about the unoccupied seat than you do. For him, you imagine, it is more like breath than wonder; he has had to think about it so much you wouldn't call it thought.

Claudia Rankine

#35. Why do you feel comfortable saying this to me? You wish the light would turn red or a police siren would go off so you could slam on the brakes, slam into the car ahead of you, fly forward so quickly both your faces would suddenly be exposed to the wind.

Claudia Rankine

#36. Leaving the day to itself, you close the door behind you and pour a bowl of cereal, then another, and would a third if you didn't interrupt yourself with the statement - you aren't hungry.
Appetite won't attach you to anything no matter how depleted you feel.

Claudia Rankine

#37. You can't put the past behind you. It's buried in you; it's turned your flesh into its own cupboard. Not everything remembered is useful but it all comes from the world to be stored in you.

Claudia Rankine

#38. Yes, and though watching tennis isn't a cure for feeling, it is a clean displacement of effort, will, and disappointment.

Claudia Rankine

#39. One of the things that I think about is: How do you make moments that float, transparent? Moments that could just float away. How do you make a body accountable for its language, its positioning? Why not make a body accountable for its language?

Claudia Rankine

#40. Then the voice in your head silently tells you to take your foot off your throat because just getting along shouldn't be an ambition.

Claudia Rankine

#41. I don't really agree with the role model thing. People are always saying that athletes shouldn't do X or Y because they are role models.

Claudia Rankine

#42. Yours is a strange dream, a strange reverie. No, it's a strange beach; each body is a strange beach, and if you let in the excess emotion you will recall the Atlantic Ocean breaking on our heads.

Claudia Rankine

#43. You don't become a poet if you want to make any money.

Claudia Rankine

#44. Each of these failures for me is a failure of communication, via a mode of communication that can be violent or meant to behave violently. Butler provides a way of thinking about how language becomes an instrument of violence. And why we feel it as such.

Claudia Rankine

#45. I always took note of them, because I think if you're in the black or brown body, you're negotiating them all the time. It's like women taking note of sexism. It's a kind of incoherency that you are constantly negotiating.

Claudia Rankine

#46. Do not say I if it means so little,
holds the little forming no one.

You are not sick, you are injured--

you ache for the rest of your life.

Claudia Rankine

#47. If you make a mistake, then you should own that mistake.

Claudia Rankine

#48. I think sports is one of the places where race plays itself out publicly. Although we pretend it doesn't.

Claudia Rankine

#49. How to care for the injured body,
the kind of body that can't hold
the content it is living?

Claudia Rankine

#50. It is the White Man who creates the black man. But it is the black man who creates.

Claudia Rankine

#51. I am invested in keeping present the forgotten bodies.

Claudia Rankine

#52. There is/no reasoning with need.

Claudia Rankine

#53. Did you win? he asks.
It wasn't a match, I say. It was a lesson.

Claudia Rankine

#54. I asked a lot of friends and people I'd meet, "Can you tell me a story of a micro-aggression that happened to you in a place you didn't expect it to happen?" I wasn't interested in scandal, or outrageous moments. I was interested in the surprise of the intimate, or the surprise of the ordinary.

Claudia Rankine

#55. I wanted a feeling of accumulation. I really wanted the moments to add up because they do add up. I wanted to come up with a strategy that would allow these moments to accumulate in the reader's body in a way that they do accumulate in the body.

Claudia Rankine

#56. The Black Lives Matter movement can be read as an attempt to keep mourning an open dynamic in our culture because black lives exist in a state of precariousness. Mourning then bears both the vulnerability inherent in black lives and the instability regarding a future for those lives.

Claudia Rankine

#57. the daily diminishment is a low flame, a constant drip.

Claudia Rankine

#58. The idea that when one reacts, one is not reacting to any one of those moments. You're reacting to the accumulation of the moments. I wanted the book, as much as the book could do this, to communicate that feeling. The feeling of saturation. Of being full up. I wanted it to be simulacra.

Claudia Rankine

#59. Memory is a tough place. You were there.

Claudia Rankine

#60. When you're writing, you think: How does intimacy happen in the work? You don't know who your reader is, woman, man, child, black person, Asian, who knows?

Claudia Rankine

#61. I don't think people want to look at problems. They want a continuous narrative, an optimistic narrative. A narrative that says there's a present and a future - and what was in the past no longer exists.

Claudia Rankine

#62. Poetry has no investment in anything besides openness. It's not arguing a point. It's creating an environment.

Claudia Rankine

#63. She has grown up, another decides, as if responding to the injustice of racism is childish and her previous demonstration of emotion was free-floating and detached from any external actions by others.

Claudia Rankine

#64. Another friend tells you you have to learn not to absorb the world. She says sometimes she can hear her own voice saying silently to whomever - you are saying this thing and I am not going to accept it. Your friend refuses to carry what doesn't belong to her.

Claudia Rankine

#65. The past is a life sentence, a blunt instrument aimed at tomorrow.

Claudia Rankine

#66. Perhaps this is how racism feels no matter the context - randomly the rules everyone else gets to play by no longer apply to you, and to call this out by calling out "I swear to God!" is to be called insane, crass, crazy. Bad sportsmanship.

Claudia Rankine

#67. Define loneliness?
Yes.
It's what we can't do for each other.

Claudia Rankine

#68. Where is the safest place when that place / must be someplace other than in the body?

Claudia Rankine

#69. I think the idea that the systemic problems in a society lead to illness is important to know. We shouldn't be separating out how we live with where we live, and what ails us with the environment we're in.

Claudia Rankine

#70. I'm not investigating race as much as I'm investigating intimacy.

Claudia Rankine

#71. For me her image, the triptych, became a study of the weight the black male figure carries, given the fact that they are targeted by the police, and are constantly in danger of being misread in public spaces.

Claudia Rankine

#72. A hoodie is worn by everybody: kids, white men, white women, black men. But it clings to the black body as a sign of criminality like nothing else.

Claudia Rankine

#73. I think having a term for a condition that is prevalent is useful, because then people understand it as something not particular to them. It allows you not to ask the question, "What's wrong with me?" and begin to ask the question, "What's wrong with this place that I'm in?"

Claudia Rankine

#74. And as light as the rain seems, it still rains down on you.

Claudia Rankine

#75. He said, I don't know what the water wanted. It wanted to show you no one would come.

Claudia Rankine

#76. The American imagination has never been able to fully recover from its white-supremacist beginnings.

Claudia Rankine

#77. If you admit to being racist, it says you acknowledge that you are being driven by projections and stereotypes that were formed in the creation of our country. Racism is deeply rooted in America.

Claudia Rankine

#78. Poetry is probably the last gift economy. Part of the negotiation is to understand that you're going to do something you really want to do, so you're going to take whatever life comes with that.

Claudia Rankine

#79. If abandoned rage asks, Who should answer for this?/
Say, the very blood of our lives eats composure up.

Claudia Rankine

#80. I love language because when it succeeds, for me, it doesn't just tell me something. It enacts something. It creates something. And it goes both ways. Sometimes it's violent. Sometimes it hurts you. And sometimes it saves you.

Claudia Rankine

#81. The truce is that. You forgive all of these moments because you're constantly waiting for the moment when you will be seen. As an equal. As just another person. As another first person. There's a letting go that comes with it.

Claudia Rankine