Latest Claudia Rankine Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• 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

  Mistake, Believe, Forgiving

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

  Interaction With Others, Waiting, Together

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

  Letting Go, Waiting, Forgiving

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

  Want, Lasts, Economy

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

  Optimistic, Past, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• In the future, we've forgotten it. It's disappointing to find out that the past is the present is the future. Nobody wants that. And yet, that's what it is. Maybe it's a kind of surrealist move, to use language like "post-racial" - thinking that if you create the language for it, it will happen. I wish it worked that way. But that's not our reality.

  Claudia Rankine

  Moving, Reality, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Whereas if you were writing an op-ed piece or an essay, somebody would be asking, "What's your point?" With poetry you can stay in a moment for as long as you want. Poetry is about metaphor, about a thing standing in for something else. It's the thing that opens out to something else. What that something else is changes for readers. So what's on the page - it falls away.

  Claudia Rankine

  Fall, Writing, Long

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

  Two, Three, Way

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• When you achieve it fully, you create something that's transparent - that people can move into and through their own experiences. As a writer, I don't want people spending time thinking, "What does she mean?" I want, in a way, my text to go away. So that the words on the page become a door to one's own internal investigation. It's just a passage. If the work does its job, it just opens.

  Claudia Rankine

  Jobs, Moving, Mean

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Poetry has no investment in anything besides openness. It's not arguing a point. It's creating an environment.

  Claudia Rankine

  Creating, Arguing, Environment

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

  Thinking, Why Not, Body

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I think words are the thing that either triumphs for you, in your desire to communicate something, or fails. I love language because when it succeeds, for me, it doesn't just tell me something. It enacts something. It creates something. And it goes both ways. Sometimes it's violent. Sometimes it hurts you. And sometimes it saves you.

  Claudia Rankine

  Hurt, Thinking, Desire

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

  Thinking, Two, Availability

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I think of the described dynamics as a fluid negotiation. I don't think these specific interactions can happen to the black or brown body without the white body. And there are ways in which, if you say, "Oh, this happened to me," then the white body can say, "Well, it happened to her and it has nothing to do with me." But if it says "you," that you is an apparent part of the encounter.

  Claudia Rankine

  Thinking, White, Black

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

  Communication, Thinking, Violence

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• My tendency is to want to say to the person, "Do you understand why I feel this way?" I usually do say that. And sometimes it doesn't go well. By this I mean we hit an impasse again. Not that I need to hear exactly what I want to hear, but I need to know I am heard. Those moments make for a better friendship. But I can't let it go. For good or bad.

  Claudia Rankine

  Mean, Let It Go, Way

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

  Thinking, Firsts, Found

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Intimacy is important in my work because I don't understand existence without intimacy. All of us are dependent on other people - and in ways we don't know. You cross the street and assume that person isn't crazy, they don't want to mow me down with their car. I don't know that person but I am already in a relationship with them. I am asking them to abide by the traffic laws. If they decided not to, I'd be dead. Even in those anonymous ways, we're in relationships.

  Claudia Rankine

  Crazy, Law, Car

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• We are invested in being together. In having friends. In joining our lives. And yet these are the people who also fail you. And when they fail you in these ways, it signals a larger understanding about who you are as a black person in the world. It's not just a little failure for me. Its something exposed.

  Claudia Rankine

  People, Understanding, Black

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

  People, Understanding, World

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

  Believe, People, Have Faith

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

  Book, Ideas, Feelings

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• So you're just moving along and suddenly you get this moment that breaks your ability to continue, and yet you continue. I wanted those kinds of moments. And initially people would say, "I don't think I have any." Their initial reaction was to render invisible those moments weaved into a kind of everydayness.

  Claudia Rankine

  Moving, Thinking, People

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

  Feelings, Add, Body

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

  Thinking, Ideas, Important

  Source: www.guernicamag.com