Top 100 Claudia Rankine Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “If you make a mistake, then you should own that mistake.”

— Claudia Rankine

2. “I think music, like writing, can be a mirror. Can turn back onto the listener, the viewer, the reader, an experience that they know but they don’t know.”

— Claudia Rankine

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

— Claudia Rankine

4. “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.”

— Claudia Rankine

5. “History’s authority over us is not broken by maintaining a silence about its continued effects.”

— Claudia Rankine

6. “I don’t think people want to look at problems. They want a continuous narrative, an optimistic narrative. A narrative that says there’s a present and a future – and what was in the past no longer exists.”

— Claudia Rankine

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

— Claudia Rankine

8. “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.”

— Claudia Rankine

9. “What does a victorious or defeated black woman’s body in a historically white space look like? Serena and her big sister Venus Williams brought to mind Zora Neale Hurston’s “I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.” This appropriated line, stenciled on canvas by Glenn Ligon, who used plastic letter stencils, smudging oil sticks, and graphite to transform the words into abstractions, seemed to be ad copy for some aspect of life for all black bodies.”

— Claudia Rankine

10. “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.”

— Claudia Rankine

11. “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.”

— Claudia Rankine

12. “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.”

— Claudia Rankine

13. “Why do you feel comfortable saying this to me? You wish the light would turn red or a police siren would go off so you could slam on the brakes, slam into the car ahead of you, fly forward so quickly both your faces would suddenly be exposed to the wind.”

— Claudia Rankine

14. “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.”

— Claudia Rankine

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

— Claudia Rankine

16. “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.”

— Claudia Rankine

17. “Because white men can’t police their imaginations, black men are dying.”

— Claudia Rankine

18. “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?”

— Claudia Rankine

19. “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.”

— Claudia Rankine

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

— Claudia Rankine

21. “You can’t drive yourself sane.”

— Claudia Rankine

22. “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?”

— Claudia Rankine

23. “If you admit to being racist, it says you acknowledge that you are being driven by projections and stereotypes that were formed in the creation of our country. Racism is deeply rooted in America.”

— Claudia Rankine

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

— Claudia Rankine

25. “People expect black women to be angry, irrationally so, without reason. They think we are animals and we go around like the Wild Things.”

— Claudia Rankine

26. “Zora Neale Hurston’s “I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.”

— Claudia Rankine

27. “The friends I have, and the people whom I admire, are people who have an understanding of the conditions under which we live, and have a humanist sense of the world. If that’s lacking in my understanding of a person’s negotiation of the world, I can’t be close with that person.”

— Claudia Rankine

28. “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 –.”

— Claudia Rankine

29. “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.”

— Claudia Rankine

30. “That’s the bruise in the heart the ice in the heart was meant to ice.”

— Claudia Rankine

31. “I’m not comfortable, for myself and for others. And yet, one has these people whom you trust, have faith in, whom you believe see what you see, and then you come up against a moment where you feel suddenly tossed out. So I was really interested in those moments.”

— Claudia Rankine

32. “The truce is that. You forgive all of these moments because you’re constantly waiting for the moment when you will be seen. As an equal. As just another person. As another first person. There’s a letting go that comes with it.”

— Claudia Rankine

33. “I want to believe that in any relational moment a person understands that the other person in front of them is just another human being.”

— Claudia Rankine

34. “You take in things you don’t want all the time. The second you hear or see some ordinary moment, all its intended targets, all the meanings behind the retreating seconds, as far as you are able to see, come into focus. Hold up, did you just hear, did you just say, did you just see, did you just do that? 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.”

— Claudia Rankine

35. “Poetry has no investment in anything besides openness. It’s not arguing a point. It’s creating an environment.”

— Claudia Rankine

36. “The patience is in the living. Time opens out to you.”

— Claudia Rankine

37. “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.”

— Claudia Rankine

38. “I am invested in keeping present the forgotten bodies.”

— Claudia Rankine

39. “I asked a lot of friends and people I’d meet, “Can you tell me a story of a micro-aggression that happened to you in a place you didn’t expect it to happen?” I wasn’t interested in scandal, or outrageous moments. I was interested in the surprise of the intimate, or the surprise of the ordinary.”

— Claudia Rankine

40. “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.”

— Claudia Rankine

41. “I also found it funny to think about blackness as the second person. That was just sort of funny. Not the first person, but the second person, the other person.”

— Claudia Rankine

42. “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.”

— Claudia Rankine

43. “You become a role model because of what you do as a person. There’s a certain point where being a role model might come from standing up for yourself and getting rid of emotion that doesn’t belong to you, emotion that is being brought on because of racist actions of others.”

— Claudia Rankine

44. “For so long you thought the ambition of racist language was to denigrate and erase you as a person. After considering Butler’s remarks, you begin to understand yourself as rendered hypervisible in the face of such language acts. Language that feels hurtful is intended to exploit all the ways that you are present. Your alertness, your openness, and your desire to engage actually demand your presence, your looking up, your talking back, and, as insane as it is, saying please.”

— Claudia Rankine

45. “The sigh is the pathway to breath; it allows breathing. That’s just self-preservation. No one fabricates that. You sit down, you sigh. You stand up, you sigh. The sighing is a worrying exhale of an ache. You wouldn’t call it an illness; still it is not the iteration of a free being. What else to liken yourself to but an animal, the ruminant kind?”

— Claudia Rankine

46. “You want to belong, you want to be here. In interactions with others you’re constantly waiting to see that they recognize that you’re a human being. That they can feel your heartbeat and you can feel theirs. And that together you will live – you will live together.”

— Claudia Rankine

47. “Again Serena’s frustrations, her disappointments, exist within a system you understand not to try to understand in any fair-minded way because to do so is to understand the erasure of the self as systemic, as ordinary.”

— Claudia Rankine

48. “For all your previous understandings, suddenly incoherence feels violent.”

— Claudia Rankine

49. “Yes, and though watching tennis isn’t a cure for feeling, it is a clean displacement of effort, will, and disappointment.”

— Claudia Rankine

50. “Memory is a tough place. You were there.”

— Claudia Rankine