Claudia Rankine quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Claudia Rankine

Claudia Rankine Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Claudia Rankine on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

The brightest memory fades faster than the dullest ink.

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

For all your previous understandings, suddenly incoherence feels violent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The worst injury is feeling you don't belong so much / to you.

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

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

I am invested in keeping present the forgotten bodies.

Memory is a tough place. You were there.

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

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.

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

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.

context is not meaning.

I don't write every day. I write when I want to write.

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

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

all in good fun,

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

There is/no reasoning with need.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.