Quotes from Claudia Rankine

Sitting there staring at the closed garage door you are reminded that a friend once told you there exists the medical term - John Henryism - for people exposed to the stresses stemming from racism. They achieve themselves to death trying to dodge the buildup of erasure.

As ocean blushes the blues it can't absorb, reflecting back a day.

But all the structures and all the diversity planning put in place to alter those structures, and all the desires of whites to assimilate blacks in their day-to-day lives, come with the continued outrage at rage. All

It was a lesson.

But I still have questions, and the way to get answers is to bear her corrections.

What is wrong with you? This question gets stuck in your dreams.

No one should adhere to the facts that contribute to narrative, the facts that create lives. To your mind, feelings are what create a person, something unwilling, something wild vandalizing whatever the skull holds. Those sensations form a someone. The headaches begin then. Don't wear sunglasses in the house, the world says, though they soothe, soothe sight, soothe you.

The days of our childhood were steep steps into a collapsing mind. It looked like we rescued ourselves, were rescued. Then there are these days, each day of our adult lives. They will never forget our way through, these brothers, each brother, my brother, dear brother, my dearest brother, dear heart --

because white men can't police their imagination black people are dying

Recognition of this lack might break you apart. Or recognition might illuminate the erasure the attempted erasure triggers. Whether such discerning creates a healthier, if more isolated, self, you can't know. In any case, Youngman doesn't speak to this kind of anger. He doesn't say that witnessing the expression of this more ordinary and daily anger might make the witness believe that a person is "insane." And

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

Though a share of all remembering, a measure of all memory, is breath and breathe you have to create a truce - a truce with the patience of a stethoscope.

You don't speak unless you are spoken to and your body speaks to the space you fill and you keep trying to fill it except the space belongs to the body of the man next to you, not to you.

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. Two

What happens to you doesn't belong to you, only half concerns you. It's not yours. Not yours only." - Claudia Rankine (cited near the title page of 'An American Marriage")

Because the foundations for loneliness begin in the dreamscapes you create. Their resemblance to reality reflects disappointment first.

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

What happens to you doesn't belong to you, only half concerns you. It's not yours. Not yours only. - Claudia Rankine (cited near the title page of 'An American Marriage' by Tayari Jones)

Yours is a strange dream, a strange reverie. No, it's a strange beach; each body is a strange beach, and if you let in the excess emotion you will recall the Atlantic Ocean breaking on our heads.

Words work as release—well-oiled doors opening and closing between intention, gesture. A pulse in a neck, the shiftiness of the hands, an unconscious blink, the conversations you have with your eyes translate everything and nothing. What will be needed, what goes unfelt, unsaid—what has been duplicated, redacted here, redacted there, altered to hide or disguise—words encoding the bodies they cover. And despite everything the body remains.

Patricia Williams has pointed out in The Alchemy of Race and Rights: "The cold game of equality staring makes me feel like a thin sheet of glass…. I could force my presence, the real me contained in those eyes, upon them, but I would be smashed in the process." Interviewed

Peckinpah gives the final shoot-out in which they all die a kind of orgasmic rush that releases all of us from the cinematic or, more accurately, the American fantasy that we will survive no matter what.

channeling his assertion that the less that is communicated the better. Be ambiguous. This type of ambiguity could also be diagnosed as dissociation and would support Serena's claim that she has had to split herself off from herself and create different personae. Now

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.