Quotes from Claudia Rankine

all in good fun,

Exactly why we survive and can look back with furrowed brow is beyond me.

The state of emergency is also always the state of emergence

Why are we here if not for each other?

I learned early that being right pales next to staying in the room.

Not long ago you are in a room where someone asks the philosopher Judith Butler what makes language hurtful. You can feel everyone lean in. Our very being exposes us to the address of another, she answers. We suffer from the condition of being addressable. Our emotional openness, she adds, is carried by our addressability. Language navigates this. For

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

To converse is to risk the unraveling of the said and the unsaid.

essential desire for equity and the ability to live freely without the fear of white terrorism literally trumps everything, as former first lady Michelle Obama expresses in Becoming.

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

Enter the title) "...It takes a personal question (or moment of doubt could be another way of thinking about it) and interrogates lines of inquiry surrounding that question, historically and psychologically. After a while the answer is known but it no longer matters because the expanding life of the question is what keeps us reading. This is the kind of book that demands I slow down the closer I get to its end, preparing myself for the loss of the speaker in my world.

The head's ache evaporates into a state of numbness, a cave of sighs. Over the years you lose the melodrama of seeing yourself as a patient. The sighing ceases; the headaches remain. You hold your head in your hands. You sit still.

You are reminded of a conversation you had recently, comparing the merits of sentences constructed implicitly with "yes, and" rather than "yes, but." You and your friend decided that "yes, and" attested to a life with no turn-off, no alternative routes:

Charlotte: Racism exists outside of reason. Black people have never been human. Charles: That is so hopeless. Charlotte: Go further into that hopelessness, and then we can really begin to see each other.

If white people don't see their whiteness, how can they speak to it? Was the student white? Who wrote the scenario? Does diversity not include any training to see ourselves or is it simply about addressing black grievance?

I was allowing myself to have too much presence in his imagination,

This is the question that nags me. National mourning, as advocated by Black Lives Matter, is a mode of intervention and interruption that might itself be assimilated into the category of public annoyance. This is altogether possible; but also possible is the recognition that it's a lack of feeling for another that is our problem. Grief, then, for these deceased others might align some of us, for the first time, with the 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. Who did what to whom on which day? Who said that? She said what? What did he just do? Did she really just say that? He said what? What did she do? Did I hear what I think I heard? Did that just come out of my mouth, his mouth, your mouth? Do you remember when you sighed?

joined all the "woke" white men who set their privilege outside themselves—as in, I know better than to be ignorant or defensive about my status in our world. Never mind that that capacity to set himself outside the pattern of white male dominance is the privilege. There's no outrunning the kingdom, the power, and the glory.

Our silence, our refusal of discomfort, our willful blindness, the shut-down feeling that refuses engagement, the rage that cancels complexity of response are also strategies. So is the need for answers and new strategies. The call for a strategy is a strategy, and I both respect and understand the necessity of that call.

All living is listening for a throat to open-- The length of its silence shaping lives. When he opened his mouth to speak, his speech was what was written in the silence, the length of the silence becoming a living.

The murkiness as we exist alongside each other calls us forward. I don't want to forget that I am here; at any given moment we are, each of us, next to any other capable of both the best and the worst our democracy has to offer.

What I know is that an inchoate desire for a future other than the one that seems to be forming our days brings me to a seat around any tale to lean forward, to hear, to respond, to await response from any other.

If this were a domestic tragedy, and it might well be, this would be your fatal flaw--your memory, vessel of your feelings.