Top 100 Claudia Rankine Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I think the idea that the systemic problems in a society lead to illness is important to know. We shouldn’t be separating out how we live with where we live, and what ails us with the environment we’re in.”

— Claudia Rankine

52. “I love revising things, because you see how you can get the language to get closer to intention. You know there are three ways to say X thing, but one will say it better than the other two. And in saying it better, it gets you closer to something.”

— Claudia Rankine

53. “I don’t know about forgiving, but it’s an “I’m still here.” And it’s not just because I have nowhere else to go. It’s because I believe in the possibility. I believe in the possibility of another way of being. Let’s make other kinds of mistakes; let’s be flawed differently.”

— Claudia Rankine

54. “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.”

— Claudia Rankine

55. “One of the things that I think about is: How do you make moments that float, transparent? Moments that could just float away. How do you make a body accountable for its language, its positioning? Why not make a body accountable for its language?”

— Claudia Rankine

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

— Claudia Rankine

57. “Sometimes the art pieces I gravitate toward speak to me in terms of narrative, at other times they speak to me in terms of mood.”

— Claudia Rankine

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

— Claudia Rankine

59. “You are reminded of a conversation you had recently, comparing the merits of sentences constructed implicitly with “yes, and” rather than “yes, but.”

— Claudia Rankine

60. “Each of these failures for me is a failure of communication, via a mode of communication that can be violent or meant to behave violently. Butler provides a way of thinking about how language becomes an instrument of violence. And why we feel it as such.”

— Claudia Rankine

61. “I always took note of them, because I think if you’re in the black or brown body, you’re negotiating them all the time. It’s like women taking note of sexism. It’s a kind of incoherency that you are constantly negotiating.”

— Claudia Rankine

62. “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.”

— Claudia Rankine

63. “You like to think memory goes far back though remembering was never recommended. Forget all that, the world says. The world’s had a lot of practice.”

— Claudia Rankine

64. “Now that there is no calling out of injustice, no yelling, no cursing, no finger wagging or head shaking, the media decides to take up the mantle when on December 12, 2012, two weeks after Serena is named WTA Player of the Year, the Dane Caroline Wozniacki, a former number-one player, imitates Serena by stuffing towels in her top and shorts, all in good fun, at an exhibition match. Racist? CNN wants to know if outrage is the proper response.”

— Claudia Rankine

65. “In a taxi speeding uptown on the West Side Highway, I let my thoughts drift below the surface of the Hudson until it finally occurs to me that feelings fill the gaps created by the indirectness of experience. Though the experience is social, thoughts carry it into a singular space and it is this that causes the feelings of loneliness; or it is this that collides the feeling with the experience so that what is left is the solitude called loneliness.”

— Claudia Rankine

66. “I wanted a feeling of accumulation. I really wanted the moments to add up because they do add up. I wanted to come up with a strategy that would allow these moments to accumulate in the reader’s body in a way that they do accumulate in the body.”

— Claudia Rankine

67. “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.”

— Claudia Rankine

68. “What does a victorious or defeated black woman’s body in a historically white space look like?”

— Claudia Rankine

69. “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

70. “So what is forgiveness and how does it show itself?”

— Claudia Rankine

71. “The lack of an integrated life meant that no part of his life recognized the treatment of black people as an important disturbance. To not remember is perhaps not to feel touched by events that don’t interfere with your livelihood. This is the reality that defines white privilege no matter how much money one has or doesn’t have. From Appalachia to Fifth Avenue, my precarity is not a reality shared.”

— Claudia Rankine

72. “The sadness lives in the recognition that a life cannot matter: Or; as there are billions of live, my sadness is alive alongside the recognition that billions of lives never mattered.”

— Claudia Rankine

73. “For me her image, the triptych, became a study of the weight the black male figure carries, given the fact that they are targeted by the police, and are constantly in danger of being misread in public spaces.”

— Claudia Rankine

74. “Teju Cole writes, “There are no refugees, only fellow citizens whose rights we have failed to acknowledge.”

— Claudia Rankine

75. “Anti-black racism is in the culture. It’s in our laws, in our advertisements, in our friendships, in our segregated cities, in our schools, in our Congress, in our scientific experiments, in our language, on the Internet, in our bodies no matter our race, in our communities, and, perhaps most devastatingly, in our justice system.”

— Claudia Rankine

76. “The idea that when one reacts, one is not reacting to any one of those moments. You’re reacting to the accumulation of the moments. I wanted the book, as much as the book could do this, to communicate that feeling. The feeling of saturation. Of being full up. I wanted it to be simulacra.”

— Claudia Rankine

77. “How our availability, our showing up, our presence, leaves us open to that violence. I think it’s a question of language, as it arrives from one body to another. It becomes the thing in between the two bodies.”

— Claudia Rankine

78. “For instance, if you’re a black guy and you got pulled over, and you didn’t know that any other black men were being pulled over, you would constantly in the back of your head be thinking, “What did I do?” rather than, “I didn’t do anything, these are just the conditions I live under.””

— Claudia Rankine

79. “Or one meaning of here is “in this world, in this life, on earth. In this place or position, indicating the presence of,” or in other words, I am here. It also means to hand something to somebody – Here you are. Here, he said to her. Here both recognizes and demands recognition. I see you, or here, he said to her. In order for something to be handed over a hand must extend and a hand must receive. We must both be here in this world in this life in this place indicating the presence of.”

— Claudia Rankine

80. “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.”

— Claudia Rankine

81. “I’m not investigating race as much as I’m investigating intimacy.”

— Claudia Rankine

82. “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?”

— Claudia Rankine

83. “I think having a term for a condition that is prevalent is useful, because then people understand it as something not particular to them. It allows you not to ask the question, “What’s wrong with me?” and begin to ask the question, “What’s wrong with this place that I’m in?””

— Claudia Rankine

84. “I don’t really agree with the role model thing. People are always saying that athletes shouldn’t do X or Y because they are role models.”

— Claudia Rankine

85. “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.”

— Claudia Rankine

86. “It strikes me that what the attack on the World Trade Center stole from us is our willingness to be complex. Or what the attack on the World Trade Center revealed to us is that we were never complex. We might want to believe that we can condemn and we can love and we can condemn because we love our country, but that’s too complex.”

— Claudia Rankine

87. “A friend tells you he has seen a photograph of you on the Internet and he wants to know why you look so angry. You and the photographer chose the photograph he refers to because you both decided it looked the most relaxed. Do you look angry? You wouldn’t have said so. Obviously this unsmiling image of you makes him uncomfortable, and he needs you to account for that. If.”

— Claudia Rankine

88. “What is it we want for our daughter? Perhaps it’s the ability to negotiate the world with an empathic imagination. The thing that brought both my husband and me to the gymnasium is the knowledge that though the deep-seated racist systems are reaffirmed and the evidence is there for us to see, I still want the world for my daughter that is more than this world, a world that has our daughter already in it.”

— Claudia Rankine

89. “Your friend refuses to carry what doesn’t belong to her. You.”

— Claudia Rankine

90. “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.”

— Claudia Rankine

91. “A friend writes of the numbing effects of humming and it returns you to your own sigh. It’s no longer audible. You’ve grown into it. Some call it aging – an internalized liquid smoke blurring ordinary ache.”

— Claudia Rankine

92. “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.”

— Claudia Rankine

93. “If you were smiling, what would that tell him about your composure in his imagination?”

— Claudia Rankine

94. “Those who voted in 2016 to be represented yet again by this form of violence, the 62 percent of white men and 47 percent of white women, a plurality, how am I to understand them?”

— Claudia Rankine

95. “As a poet, I want to use language to enter that space of feeling.” –.”

— Claudia Rankine

96. “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.”

— Claudia Rankine

97. “No one can get behind the feeling that caused a pause in the match, not even the player trying to put her feelings behind her, dumping ball after ball into the net. Though you can retire with an injury, you can’t walk away because you feel bad.”

— Claudia Rankine

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

— Claudia Rankine

99. “Hegel argued that death is used as a threat to keep citizens in line. The minute you stop feating death you are no longer controlled by governments and councils. In a sense you are no longer accountable to life.”

— Claudia Rankine

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

— Claudia Rankine