Don’t Let Me Be Lonely Quotes

“In my dream I apologize to everyone I meet. Instead of introducing myself, I apologize for not knowing why I am alive. I am sorry. I am sorry. I apologize. In real life, oddly enough, when I am fully awake and out and about, if I catch someone’s eye, I quickly look away. Perhaps this too is a form of apology. Perhaps this is the form apologies take in real life. In real life the looking away is the apology, despite the fact that when I look away I almost always feel guilty; I do not feel as if I have apologized. Instead I feel as if I have created a reason to apologize, I feel the guilt of having ignored that thing—the encounter. I could have nodded, I could have smiled without showing my teeth. In some small way I could have wordlessly said, I see you seeing me and I apologize for not knowing why I am alive. I am sorry. I am sorry. I apologize. Afterwards, after I have looked away, I never feel as if I can say, Look, look at me again so that I can see you, so that I can acknowledge that I have seen you, so that I can see you and apologize.”
― Claudia Rankine, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric

“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, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric

“Sad is one of those words that has given up its life for our country, it's been a martyr for the American dream, it's been neutralized, co-opted by our culture to suggest a tinge of discomfort that lasts the time it takes for this and then for that to happen, the time it takes to change a channel. But sadness is real because once it meant something real. It meant dignified, grave; it meant trustworthy; it meant exceptionally bad, deplorable, shameful; it meant massive, weighty, forming a compact body; it meant falling heavily; and it meant of a color: dark. It meant dark in color, to darken. It meant me. I felt sad.”
― Claudia Rankine, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric

“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, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric

“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, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric

“Sometimes you read something and a thought that was floating around in your veins organizes itself into the sentence that reflects it.”
― Claudia Rankine, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric

“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, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric

“Then all life is a form of waiting, but it is the waiting of loneliness. One waits to recognize the other, to see the other as one sees the self. Levinas writes, 'The subject who speaks is situated in relation to the other. This privilege of the other ceases to be incomprehensible once we admit that the first fact of existence is neither being in itself nor being for itself but being for the other, in other words, that human existence is a creature. By offering a word, the subject putting himself forward lays himself open and, in a sense, prays.”
― Claudia Rankine, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric

“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, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric

“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, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric

“The sadness lives in the recognition that a life cannot matter: Or; as there are billions of lives, my sadness is alive alongside the recognition that billions of lives never mattered.”
― Claudia Rankine, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric

“So what is forgiveness and how does it show itself?”
― Claudia Rankine, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric

“Because the foundations for loneliness begin in the dreamscapes you create. Their resemblance to reality reflects disappointment first.”
― Claudia Rankine, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric

“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, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric

“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.”
― Claudia Rankine, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric

“Peckinpah gives the final shoot-out in which they all die a kind of orgasmic rush that releases all of us from the cinematic or, more accurately, the American fantasy that we will survive no matter what.”
― Claudia Rankine, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric

“I forget things too. It makes me sad. Or it makes me the saddest. The sadness is not really about George W. or our American optimism; the sadness lives in the recognition that a life can not matter. Or, as there are billions of lives, my sadness is alive alongside the recognition that billions of lives never mattered. I write this without breaking my heart, without bursting into anything. Perhaps this is the real source of my sadness. Or, perhaps, Emily Dickinson, my love, hope was never a thing with feathers. I don't know, I just find when the news comes on I switch the channel. This new tendency might be indicative of a deepening personality flaw: IMH, The Inability to Maintain Hope, which translates into no innate trust in the supreme laws that govern us. Cornel West says this is what is wrong with black people today--too nihilistic. Too scarred by hope to hope, too experienced to experience, too close to dead is what I think.”
― claudia rankine, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric

“Or Paul Celan said that the poem was no different from a handshake. (...) The handshake is our decided ritual of both asserting (I am here) and handing over (here) a self to another. Hence the poem is that - Here. I am here. This conflation of the solidity of presence with the offering of this same presence perhaps has everything to do with being alive.”
― Claudia Rankine, Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric