Quotes from Claudia Rankine

Words work as release--well-oiled doors opening and closing between intention, gesture.

Anchored in unknowing, I yearn to rise out of the restlessness of my own forms of helplessness inside a structure that constricts possibilities.

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?

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.

People feel hurt when you point out the reality that forms experience because the reality is not their emotional experience.

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.

Later that same day I ask a white friend about white people speaking among themselves about their racism. It doesn't happen, she tells me. Nonetheless, she believes, that's how whites would learn to build stamina regarding their collusion with structural racism.

After it happened I was at a loss for words. Haven't you said this yourself? Haven't you said this to a close friend who early in your friendship, when distracted, would call you by the name of her black housekeeper? You assumed you two were the only black people in her life. Eventually she stopped doing this, though she never acknowledged her slippage. And you never called her on it (why not?) and yet, you don't forget.

there exists the medical term—John Henryism—for people exposed to stresses stemming from racism. They achieve themselves to death trying to dodge the buildup of erasure. Sherman James, the researcher who came up with the term, claimed the physiological costs were high. You hope by sitting in silence you are bucking the trend.

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.

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.

You put on your glasses. The trees, their bark, their leaves, even the dead ones, are more vibrant wet. Yes, and it's raining. Each moment is like this- before it can be known, categorized as similar to another thing and dismissed, it has to be experienced, it has to be seen.

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

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--

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.

a friend once told you there exists the medical term—John Henryism—for people exposed to stresses stemming from racism. They achieve themselves to death trying to dodge the buildup of erasure.

What we live before the light is turned off is what prevents the light from being turned off. 'The quotidian

You can't drive yourself sane.

The girl is Catholic with waist-length brown hair. You can't remember her name: Mary? Catherine? You never really speak except for the time she makes her request and later when she tells you you smell good and have features more like a white person. You assume she thinks she is thanking you for letting her cheat and feels better cheating from an almost white person.

Just 2 percent of the world's population and 5 percent of white people in the U.S. have blond hair, but 35 percent of female U.S. senators and 48 percent of female CEOs at S&P 500 companies are

I don't think white people identify themselves as white Americans. They think their perspective is objective. They don't realize they're always invested in the advancement of white people.

Yes, and this is how you are a citizen: Come on. Let it go. Move on.

You have a destination that doesn't include acting like this moment isn't inhabitable, hasn't happened before, and the before isn't part of the now as the night darkens and the time shortens between where we are now and where we are going.

The man doesn't acknowledge you as you sit down because the man knows more about the unoccupied seat than you do. For him, you imagine, it is more like breath than wonder; he has had to think about it so much you wouldn't call it thought.