Quotes from 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.

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

Memory is a tough place. You were there. If this is not the truth, it is also not a lie.

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

Forgiveness, I finally decide, is not the death of amnesia, nor is it a form of madness, as Derrida claims. For the one who forgives, it is simply a death, a dying down in the heart, the position of the already dead. It is in the end the living through, the understanding that this has happened, is happening, happens. Period. It is a feeling of nothingness that cannot be communicated to another, an absence, a bottomless vacancy held by the living, beyond all that is hatred or love.

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

There is/no reasoning with need.

The brightest memory fades faster than the dullest ink.

You begin to think, maybe erroneously, that this other kind of anger is really a type of knowledge: the type that both clarifies and disappoints. It responds to insult and attempted erasure simply by asserting presence, and the energy required to present, to react, to assert is accompanied by visceral disappointment: a disappointment in the sense that no amount of visibility will alter the ways in which one is perceived.

Yes, and the body has a 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.

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

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.

I)n memory, remorse wraps the self.

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

context is not meaning.