Claudia Rankine Quotes

In any case, it is difficult not to think that if Serena lost context by abandoning all rules of civility, it could be because her body, trapped in a racial imaginary, trapped in disbelief - code for being black in America - is being governed not by the tennis match she is participating in but by a collapsed relationship that had promised to play by the rules. 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. Two ~ Claudia Rankine

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

My tendency is to want to say to the person, "Do you understand why I feel this way?" I usually do say that. And sometimes it doesn't go well. By this I mean we hit an impasse again. Not that I need to hear exactly what I want to hear, but I need to know I am heard. Those moments make for a better friendship. But I can't let it go. For good or bad. ~ Claudia Rankine

What does a victorious or defeated black woman's body in a historically white space look like? Serena and her big sister Venus Williams brought to mind Zora Neale Hurston's "I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background." This appropriated line, stenciled on canvas by Glenn Ligon, who used plastic letter stencils, smudging oil sticks, and graphite to transform the words into abstractions, seemed to be ad copy for some aspect of life for all black bodies. ~ Claudia Rankine

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

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

Memory is a tough place. You were there. ~ Claudia Rankine

In the future, we've forgotten it. It's disappointing to find out that the past is the present is the future. Nobody wants that. And yet, that's what it is. Maybe it's a kind of surrealist move, to use language like "post-racial" - thinking that if you create the language for it, it will happen. I wish it worked that way. But that's not our reality. ~ Claudia Rankine

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

Sometimes you read something and a thought that was floating around in your veins organizes itself into the sentence that reflects it. ~ Claudia Rankine

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

The subject who speaks is situated in relation to the other. This privilege of the other ceases to be incomprehensible once we admit that the first fact of existence is neither being in itself nor being for itself but being for the other, in other words, that human existence is a creature. By offering a word, the subject putting himself forward lays himself open and, in a sense, prays. ~ Claudia Rankine

I tried to fit language into the shape of usefulness. The world moves through words as if the bodies the words reflect do not exist. ~ Claudia Rankine

I was at Yale and I said to the poet Elizabeth Alexander, "I'm interested in the ways in which black health seems precarious in the United States." She introduced me to the term "John Henryism." And then I went back and researched it and understood that, woah, this thing I am thinking about is actually a condition that's named. ~ Claudia Rankine

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

I was really interested in the fact that blacks have high blood pressure, heart disease, and diabetes at a higher percentage than the rest of the population. That didn't stay very aggressively in the book, but that's how it started. I began to document these moments as support for this other thing I was thinking about, and then the moments themselves began to take over. ~ Claudia Rankine

That time and that time and that time the outside blistered the inside of you, words outmanoeuvred years, had you in a chokehold, every part roughed up, the eyes dripping. ~ Claudia Rankine

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

Did you win? he asks.
It wasn't a match, I say. It was a lesson. ~ Claudia Rankine

To live through the days sometimes you moan like deer. Sometimes you sigh. The world says stop that. Another sigh. Another stop that. Moaning elicits laughter, sighing upsets. Perhaps each sigh is drawn into existence to pull in, pull under, who knows; truth be told, you could no more control those sighs than that which brings the sighs about. ~ Claudia Rankine

If you make a mistake, then you should own that mistake. ~ Claudia Rankine

A friend argues that Americans battle between the "historical self" and the "self self." By this she means you mostly interact as friends with mutual interest and, for the most part, compatible personalities; however, sometimes your historical selves, her white self and your black self, or your white self and her black self, arrive with the full force of your American positioning. Then you are standing face-to-face in seconds that wipe the affable smiles right from your mouths. What did you say? Instantaneously your attachment seems fragile, tenuous, subject to any transgression of your historical self. And though your joined personal histories are supposed to save you from misunderstandings, they usually cause you to understand all too well what is meant. ~ Claudia Rankine

Black Lives Matter, the movement founded by the activists Alicia Garza, Patrisse Callie's, and Opal Tometi, began with the premise that the incommensurable experience of systemic racism creates an unequal playing field. The American imagination has never been able to fully recover from its white-supremacist beginnings. Consequently, our laws and attitudes have been straining against the devaluation of the black body. Despite good intentions, the associations of blackness with inarticulate, bestial criminality persist beneath the appearance of white civility. This assumption both frames and determines our individual interactions and experiences as citizens. ~ Jesmyn Ward

How to care for the injured body,
the kind of body that can't hold
the content it is living? ~ Claudia Rankine

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

Define loneliness?
Yes.
It's what we can't do for each other. ~ Claudia Rankine

The sadness lives in the recognition that a life cannot matter: Or; as there are billions of live, my sadness is alive alongside the recognition that billions of lives never mattered. ~ Claudia Rankine

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

After her three-second celebratory dance on center court at the All England Club, the American media reported, And there was Serena ... Crip-Walking all over the most lily-white place in the world ... . You couldn't help but shake your head ... . What Serena did was akin to cracking a tasteless, X-rated joke inside a church ... . What she did was immature and classless. ~ Claudia Rankine

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

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

You cannot say - A body translates its you - you there, hey you even as it loses the location of its mouth. When you lay your body in the body entered as if skin and bone were public places, when you lay your body in the body entered as if you're the ground you walk on, you know no memory should live in these memories becoming the body of you. ~ Claudia Rankine

Because white men can't
police their imagination
black men are dying ~ Claudia Rankine

The American imagination has never been able to fully recover from its white-supremacist beginnings. ~ Claudia Rankine

The subject of so many films is the protection of the victim, and I think, I don't give a damn about those things. It's not the job of films to nurse people. With what's happening in the chemistry of love, I don't want to be a nurse or a doctor, I just want to be an observer."

As a child, Claire Denis wished to be a nurse; she is no longer a child. Years have passed and soon we love this world, so soon we are willing to coexist with dust in our eyes. ~ Claudia Rankine

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

Sad is one of those words that has given up its life for our country, it's been a martyr for the American dream, it's been neutralized, co-opted by our culture to suggest a tinge of discomfort that lasts the time it takes for this and then for that to happen, the time it takes to change a channel. But sadness is real because once it meant something real. It meant dignified, grave; it meant trustworthy; it meant exceptionally bad, deplorable, shameful; it meant massive, weighty, forming a compact body; it meant falling heavily; and it meant of a color: dark. It meant dark in color, to darken. It meant me. I felt sad. ~ Claudia Rankine

The world is wrong. 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. Who did what to whom on which day? Who said that? She said what? What did he just do? Did she really say that? He said what? What did she do? Did I hear what I think I heard? Did that just come out of my mouth, his mouth, your mouth? Do you remember when you sighed? ~ Claudia Rankine

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

I want to believe that in any relational moment a person understands that the other person in front of them is just another human being. ~ Claudia Rankine

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

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

Anti-black racism is in the culture. It's in our laws, in our advertisements, in our friendships, in our segregated cities, in our schools, in our Congress, in our scientific experiments, in our language, on the Internet, in our bodies no matter our race, in our communities, and, perhaps most devastatingly, in our justice system. ~ Claudia Rankine

Whereas if you were writing an op-ed piece or an essay, somebody would be asking, "What's your point?" With poetry you can stay in a moment for as long as you want. Poetry is about metaphor, about a thing standing in for something else. It's the thing that opens out to something else. What that something else is changes for readers. So what's on the page - it falls away. ~ Claudia Rankine

Where is the safest place when that place / must be someplace other than in the body? ~ Claudia Rankine

the daily diminishment is a low flame, a constant drip. ~ Claudia Rankine

It is the White Man who creates the black man. But it is the black man who creates. ~ Claudia Rankine

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

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

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

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

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

Words work as release - well-oiled doors opening and closing between intention, gesture. A pulse in a neck, the shiftiness of the hands, an unconscious blink, the conversations you have with your eyes translate everything and nothing. What will be needed, what goes unfelt, unsaid - what has been duplicated, redacted here, redacted there, altered to hide or disguise - words encoding the bodies they cover. And despite everything the body remains. Occasionally it is interesting to think about the outburst if you would just cry out - To know what you'll sound like is worth noting - ~ Claudia Rankine

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

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

When you achieve it fully, you create something that's transparent - that people can move into and through their own experiences. As a writer, I don't want people spending time thinking, "What does she mean?" I want, in a way, my text to go away. So that the words on the page become a door to one's own internal investigation. It's just a passage. If the work does its job, it just opens. ~ Claudia Rankine

That's the bruise the ice in the heart was meant to ice. ~ Claudia Rankine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am invested in keeping present the forgotten bodies. ~ Claudia Rankine

You can't drive yourself sane. ~ Claudia Rankine

The past is a life sentence, a blunt instrument aimed at tomorrow. ~ Claudia Rankine

If the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s civil rights movement made demands that altered the course of American lives and backed up those demands with the willingness to give up your life in service of your civil rights, with Black Lives Matter, a more internalized change is being asked for: recognition. ~ Claudia Rankine

Perhaps Mahalia, like Paul Celan, has already lived all our lives for us. Perhaps that is the definition of genius. Hegel says, "Each man hopes and believes he is better than the world which is his, but the man who is better merely expresses this same world better than the others. ~ Claudia Rankine

For all your previous understandings, suddenly incoherence feels violent. ~ Claudia Rankine

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

I think of the described dynamics as a fluid negotiation. I don't think these specific interactions can happen to the black or brown body without the white body. And there are ways in which, if you say, "Oh, this happened to me," then the white body can say, "Well, it happened to her and it has nothing to do with me." But if it says "you," that you is an apparent part of the encounter. ~ Claudia Rankine

The patience is in the living. Time opens out to you. ~ Claudia Rankine

In a taxi speeding uptown on the West Side Highway, I let my thoughts drift below the surface of the Hudson until it finally occurs to me that feelings fill the gaps created by the indirectness of experience. Though the experience is social, thoughts carry it into a singular space and it is this that causes the feelings of loneliness; or it is this that collides the feeling with the experience so that what is left is the solitude called loneliness. ~ Claudia Rankine

You are you even before you grow into understanding you are not anyone, worthless, not worth you. Even as your own weight insists you are here, fighting off the weight of nonexistence. And still this life parts your lids, you see you seeing your extending hand as a falling wave - I they he she we you turn only to discover the encounter to be alien to this place. Wait. The patience is in the living. Time opens out to you. The opening, between you and you, occupied, zoned for an encounter, given the histories of you and you - And always, who is this you? The start of you, each day, a presence already - Hey you - ~ Claudia Rankine

-(I)n memory, remorse wraps the self. ~ Claudia Rankine

I don't write every day. I write when I want to write. ~ Claudia Rankine

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

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

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

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

What did the mat say to the door? You must be really aDOORable to open up to everyone who knock at you. And I welcome everyone and what do I get? People stepping all over me ~ Ana Claudia Antunes

For my own good. Anytime anyone had ever used those words to me, they hadn't had the slightest clue what 'my own good' truly was ~ Claudia Gray

You know Jack wants to do everything you do. ~ Claudia Connor

We have very professional, amazing chefs that are contestants. Most of them have their own restaurants and are settled, recognized chefs in Mexico. That gives the show [Top Chef] a different level completely; the gastronomic level is very high. It makes it all more interesting and the competition is just harder and harder. ~ Ana Claudia Talancon

Thunder rumbled. My heart beat faster. I turned away from Evernight for the last time and looked back at the flower as it trembled upon its branch. A single petal was torn away by the wind. Pushing my hands through the thorns, I felt lashes of pain across my skin, but i kept going determined.
But when my fingertip touched the flower, it instantly darkened, withering and drying as each petal turned black. ~ Claudia Gray

The words 'theory' and 'practice' are of Greek origin; they carry our thoughts back to the ancient philosophers by whom they were contrived, and by whom they were also contrasted and placed in opposition, as denoting two mutually conflicting and mutually inconsistent ideas ... [this fallacy] based on a double system of natural laws retarded for centuries the development of physical science, notably mechanics. ~ William John Macquorn Rankine

We can always hate that which we loved, and with a fire as great as our love once was. ~ Claudia Gray

That's right", she says, wiping tears from her cheeks. "You weren't with me that time I walked in on them doing the deed. Seriously Freudian horror."
"You saw your parents at the best," Mom murmurs, before Dad sweeps her into another kiss.
"Go ahead," Josie calls. "Mate in public. Tonight we won't even mind. You deserve to break a few decency laws. ~ Claudia Gray

People can forgive anything except being proved wrong. ~ Claudia Gray

I would love you in any shape, in any world, with any past. Never doubt that. - ~ Claudia Gray

In despair Leia thought, They are using both my fathers against me. ~ Claudia Gray

As much as each version has in common with all the others, we're still unique. Every single one of us, everywhere, is irreplaceable. ~ Claudia Gray

I wish everyone was a sci-fi geek because then there would be no violence in the world. There'd be no wars. There'd only be people e-mailing each other. ~ Claudia Christian

Everyone has at least one story that will stop your heart. ~ Claudia Shear

Those who connect more frequently with their needs and are in constant conversation with their own beings, they can establish a parameter of what kind of workout and effort must be applied, of what amount of energy disposed and to be utilized, it will serve many times as a thermometer for those who listen to their bodies needs and feel what the internal thermostat is saying. ~ Ana Claudia Antunes

I've auctioned off many scripts and will continue to do so for good causes. ~ Claudia Christian

We will never have total control over this extraordinary dimension. Time will warp and confuse and baffle and entertain however much we learn about its capacities. But the more we learn, the more we can shape it to our will and destiny. We can slow it down or speed it up. We can hold on to the past more securely and predict the future more accurately. Mental time-travel is one of the greatest gifts of the mind. It makes us human, and it makes us special. ~ Claudia Hammond

expression. She threw Claudia a helpless glance. "The only time I get family news is from the boys, and you know I hardly ever hear from them." "When we find her," Erin said tearfully, "You'll get to meet her. I promise." They stared at each other in shared distress, the reunion caused - and ruined - by the same terrifying event. "I thought he'd just taken her out for a walk," said Erin. Tears welled up and spilled over. She sniffled into the ~ Sheila Lowe