Claudia Rankine Quotes

Because white men can’t police their imaginations, black men are dying.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

I am invested in keeping present the forgotten bodies.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

There is/no reasoning with need.

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 nothingto solve even as each moment is an answer.

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

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