Deborah Truscott > Quotes

“We look everywhere for happiness. In the end, we find it where we least expect.”
― Deborah Truscott, Out of Time

“We were all at the mercy of chance.”
― Deborah Truscott, Across Time

“So for you this ‘two-ness’ is less your internal sense of self warring with how others view you than it is…something more congenital.” “Yes, exactly. It’s innate, inborn. I descend from the oppressed and the oppressor. I’m both the white girl and the ‘colored’ girl.” I could see Susannah was struggling with this. “Do you think white people view you as black and black people view you as white?” she asked. “It’s trickier than that. I think both white and black people view me as neither. Damn. I hate talking about stuff like this,” I said suddenly. “And I wish I hadn’t contrived such a complicated background for myself here. I’m living a euphemism. That’s what my ‘two-ness’ is, or what it’s become. All that Moorish-Spanish-French business, hiding what I am. Why can I not be simply what I am, a biracial woman from Virginia?”
― Deborah Truscott, Across Time

“If one was very lucky, one found the protection of charity, but far too often charity was given grudgingly, meanly. Just as in my century, being poor, being a victim, or even being sick was often viewed as a weakness of character or the outcome of bad choices.”
― Deborah Truscott, Across Time

“The opinion of others. I was silent for a while, thinking about that. Then I said, “Have you ever read W.E.B. Dubois?” “No. I’ve heard the name in my native time, however. He was a twentieth-century activist, I believe.” “Yes. And biracial. He had an incredibly long life, from the 1860s to the 1960s, and his work was based on a blend of social analyses—but that’s not my point. The thing is, he wrote about something he called ‘double consciousness,’ which he believed was a kind of internal conflict experienced by oppressed people. He described it as the sense of looking at yourself through the eyes of people who believe you to be somehow subordinate or inferior. Your view of yourself is inevitably at war with the oppressor’s view. Anyway, he called it a two-ness, and that’s the word that resonated with me. A two-ness. Although perhaps I experience it differently from what he intended”
― Deborah Truscott, Across Time

“So it’s possible that she could be…” “Smuggled goods,” Mr. Dunne supplied. “Yes. I believe that may be a possibility. She is that or a child lost or sold from her enslaved mother. And in bondage all the same.” They did that, I thought. They sold children away from their mothers. They auctioned human beings without regard to family ties or kinship. In my own country, they did this. And to my own family.”
― Deborah Truscott, Across Time