Date: 2004

"Those final sounds, however, are nothing like the wind moving through the vacancy of a mind."

— Rankine, Claudia (b. 1963)

Date: 2014

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

— Rankine, Claudia (b. 1963)

Date: 2014

"To your mind, feelings are what create a person, something unwilling, something wild vandalizing whatever the skull holds."

— Rankine, Claudia (b. 1963)

Date: 2014

"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."

— Rankine, Claudia (b. 1963)

Date: 2014

"Memory is a tough place."

— Rankine, Claudia (b. 1963)

Date: 2014

"Words work as release--well-oiled doors opening and closing between intention, gesture."

— Rankine, Claudia (b. 1963)

Date: 2014

"No, it's a strange beach; each body is a strange beach, and if you let in the excess emotion you will recall the Atlantic Ocean breaking on our heads."

— Rankine, Claudia (b. 1963)

Date: 2014

"She'd heard that once and was trying to stamp the phrase on her mind."

— Rankine, Claudia (b. 1963)

Date: 2014

"The days of our childhood together were steep steps into a collapsing mind."

— Rankine, Claudia (b. 1963)

Date: 2014

"Those years of and before me and my brothers, the years of passage, plantation, migration, of Jim Crow segregation, of poverty, inner cities, profiling, of one in three, two jobs, boy, hey boy, each a felony, accumulate into the hours, inside our lives where we are all caught hanging, the rope i...

— Rankine, Claudia (b. 1963)