Double Consciousness Quotes

One ever feels his twoness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled stirrings.

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife – this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.

Sometimes it seems as if I have spent the first half of my life refusing to let white people define me and the second half refusing to let black people define me.

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, - this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost... He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American.

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, - a world which yields him no self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world.

I've said that playing the blues is like having to be black twice. Stevie Ray Vaughan missed on both counts, but I never noticed.

I think I've been writing black poems all along, wearing my white mask. I'm always the victim ... but no longer!

I am so used to having two faces. A face that I had for black America and a face for white America. When Obama became president, I lost both faces. Now I only have one face.

I always felt that I wasn't as American as Americans and then I realised when I got back to the Philippines that I was not Filipino.

One ever feels his twoness - an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

Every black American is bilingual. All of them. We speak street vernacular and we speak 'job interview.'

If I cannot live with myself, there must be two of me

I like people who dream or talk to themselves interminably; I like them, for they are double. They are here and elsewhere.

An American, a Negro... two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

Writers do not live one life, they live two. There is the living and then there is the writing. There is the second tasting, the delayed reaction.

I've never seen anyone more messed up over success than Richard Pryor. For him, it's a constant battle between success in the white world and keeping it real for his black self.

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.

I would encounter W. E. B. Du Bois and the term double consciousness. When I read it, I thought about sitting in my mother's employer's family room, watching my mother clean while I waited for her to finish so we could go home.

We are proud of our ridiculousness. That's what made our Surrealism. Proud and ashamed of everything at the same time. I think that's my definition of Belgium.

We are often in two places at once. In fact we are usually in at least two places and occasionally the contrast is evident....Here, most often, is nothing more than the best perspective to contemplate there.

Once it has learned to dream the double, the self arrives at this weird crossroad and a moment comes when one realizes that it is the double who dreams the self.

I feel partly American, but I have an ambiguous relation with both America and India, the only two countries I really know. I never feel fully one way or the other.

It's the African-American experience. You've got to wear different masks. When you're in the hood, if you stand out, you get picked on for being weak. Sometimes you have to hide your intelligence. In front of your boys, you might put on a bit of bravado, be a little bit tougher.

I'm fully conscious all the time that I'm an American Negro, because it's part of my life. But I also know that if I want to say, 'I see a bus full of people,' I don't have to say, 'I am a Negro seeing a bus full of people.'

It's always the case that the minority has to navigate two different worlds. Women have to know how to live in a man's world. Gay people have to know how to live in a straight world. Black people gotta know how to live in a predominantly white world.