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

- Claudia Rankine

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

- Claudia Rankine

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

- Claudia Rankine

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 c…

- Claudia Rankine

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

- Claudia Rankine

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'…

- Claudia Rankine

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. …

- Claudia Rankine

Define loneliness? Yes. It's what we can't do for each other.

- Claudia Rankine

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