Quotations

“The poet writes out of his experience, whether it be personal or vicarious, and as these experiences differ among other poets, so do they differ among Negro poets; for the double obligation of being both Negro and American is not so unified as we are often led to believe.”

Insists that double identity does not flatten every Black poet into one voice · Foreword, Caroling Dusk, 1927

Countee Cullen

“If I am going to be a poet at all, I am going to be POET and not NEGRO POET.”

His most famous statement of the wish to be judged as an artist rather than as a racial spokesman · Interview, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 10 February 1924

Countee Cullen

“I have a horror of the homeland.”

Original: J’ai horreur de la patrie. — The provocative declaration rejects patriotism as a defining source of identity or obligation. · A Season in Hell, Bad Blood, 1873 (French)

Arthur Rimbaud

“I understand that I was always of an inferior race.”

Original: Je comprends que j’ai toujours été de race inférieure. — The statement deepens the work’s exploration of inherited identity, estrangement and refusal of conventional belonging. · A Season in Hell, Bad Blood, 1873 (French)

Arthur Rimbaud

“I am a slave to my baptism.”

Original: Je suis esclave de mon baptême. — The statement expresses Rimbaud’s conflicted relationship with inherited religious and cultural identity. · A Season in Hell, Bad Blood, 1873 (French)

Arthur Rimbaud

“In public life, once a person has constructed his character and hears its echo, he plays the character, or rather the character plays him.”

Original: Dans toute carrière publique, une fois que l'on a construit son personnage, et que le bruit qu'il fait revient à son auteur, celui-ci joue son personnage, ou plutôt son personnage le joue. — Public identity can become a role that eventually controls the person who originally created it. · Cahiers (French)

Paul Valéry

“The work flows from the deepest part of your life, yet it does not merge with you.”

Original: Cette œuvre découle du plus intime de ta vie, et cependant elle ne se confond pas avec toi. — A finished creation becomes independent of its maker even though it originates in the maker's deepest self. · Eupalinos ou l'Architecte (French)

Paul Valéry

“I am becoming terribly myself, perhaps in reaction against everything that increasingly forces me to be someone else.”

Original: Je deviens terriblement moi-même. Peut-être par réaction contre tout ce qui me contraint de plus en plus à être un autre. — Individuality can emerge as a resistance to social pressure and imposed identities. · Cahiers (French)

Paul Valéry

“It is what I carry that is unknown to myself that makes me myself.”

Original: C'est ce que je porte d'inconnu à moi-même qui me fait moi. — Identity is presented as containing an irreducible element that remains mysterious even to oneself. · Monsieur Teste (French)

Paul Valéry

“We are always the same age inside.”

A reflection on the continuity of inner identity across time · Conversation, commonly attributed

Gertrude Stein

“I was not confined to my own identity, and I could people the hours with creations far more interesting to me at that age, than my own sensations.”

Describing imagination as a way of moving beyond the limits of one's immediate self. · Introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

“A people always ends by resembling its shadow.”

A striking observation on how a society can become shaped by the image it projects. · Conversation with André Maurois, c. 1930

Rudyard Kipling

“The Dorset dialect is a broad and bold shape of the English language, as the Doric was of the Greek.”

Defending Dorset speech as a rich and legitimate form of English rather than a corrupted one · A Dissertation on the Dorset Dialect of the English Language

William Barnes

“I myself, Andalusian, Sevillian to the marrow—from there I come, and my parents and grandparents before me—sing my own feelings in the style of my land, with no aim but to ease them or exalt them, as they pain or please me.”

Original: Yo mismo, andaluz, sevillano hasta la médula (de allí soy, de allí mis padres y mis abuelos), canto al estilo de mi tierra los sentimientos propios, sin otra idea que la de aliviarlos o exaltarlos, según me duelen o me complacen. — Explains his adoption of the Andalusian copla as a vehicle for direct personal feeling rather than folkloric imitation · Preface to Cante hondo, 1912 (Spanish)

Manuel Machado

“A sectional literature does not seem to us to promise much.”

Scepticism about literature defined primarily by regional allegiance · Letter concerning Southern literature

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

“Tell me whom you associate with, and I will tell you who you are.”

Original: Sage mir, mit wem du umgehst, so sage ich dir, wer du bist. — The company we choose is presented as a revealing reflection of our character. · Maxims and Reflections (German)

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“The Irishman, finding himself in another environment, outside Ireland, very often knows how to make his worth felt.”

Joyce links exile with the opportunity for individual development. · Lecture, Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages, 1907

James Joyce

“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.”

Framing liberation as the achievement of an undivided and fully recognised self. · The Souls of Black Folk, 1903

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois

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

Expressing the divided identity produced by racial exclusion. · The Souls of Black Folk, 1903

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois

“A friend is a second self.”

Presenting friendship as a form of profound recognition and shared identity · Prose, A Cypress Grove

William Drummond

“The world's a stage, on which all men are players: they have their exits and their entrances; and each man in his time plays many parts.”

A memorable meditation on the roles people assume throughout life, often associated with but predating Shakespeare's similar formulation · Essay, An Apology for Actors

Thomas Heywood