Quotes from 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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Memory is a tough place. You were there.

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

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.

Yes, and the body has memory. The physical carriage hauls more than its weight. The body is the threshold across which each objectionable call passes into consciousness—all the unintimidated, unblinking, and unflappable resilience does not erase the moments lived through, even as we are eternally stupid or everlastingly optimistic, so ready to be inside, among, a part of the games.