Doppelganger Quotes

“On a winter night I hear the Easter bell:
I knock on graves and quicken the dead,
Until at last in a grave I see — myself.

(Winter Sonnets: XI)”
― Vyacheslav Ivanov, Silver Age of Russian Culture

“They say when you meet somebody that looks just like you, you die.”
― P. Wish, The Doppelgänger

“My doppelganger wraps the ear in a handkerchief and shoves it into his pocket as he leaves the train with a nod of his head in my direction.”

William Wilson in the short story 'Metro' by Steen Langstrup”
― Steen Langstrup, Metro

“We agreed that whatever happened next in the world, we would still rub conditioner into our hair after we washed it and comb it through to the ends, we would soften our lips with rose-, strawberry-, and cherry-scented balms, and though we would be interested to see a wolf perched in a lonely mountain, we liked our household animals to betray their savage nature and live with us in our reality, which was not theirs. They would lie in our laps and let us stroke them through waves of virus, wars, drought and floods and we would try not to transmit our fear to them.”
― Deborah Levy, August Blue

“Discernment has a doppelgänger, and her name is Suspicion.”
― Criss Jami

“Double You by Stewart Stafford

Life can make a twin of you,
When you occupy the same air,
You can't feel them twinning you,
Until your doppelgänger's there.

You're twice the Sapien you were,
Cloned and replicated new fellows,
You're not feeling yourself just now,
Feats and phrases are all echoes.

But if someone seeks out a quote,
You tell them to ask the mirror you,
Only things trumping who you are,
Are you and matching Double You.

© Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“If you are fighting "slavery forever" or a modern-day Hitler, everything - including the companion you find yourself in bed with - is a minor detail. It's similar, in many ways, to how evangelical Christians were coaxed by their leaders to set aside the fact that Trump's behavior - the philandering, the alleged sexual assaults, the lying, the cruelty - violated their professed values. To get over all that, they had to cast him, in all seriousness, as the Lord's messy messenger, put on earth to fight God's own doppelganger: the devil. With stakes as high as eternal salvation, what's a little pussy grabbing?”
― Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World

“In other words, the double's imaginary power and resonance - the level upon which the subject's simultaneous estrangement from himself and intimacy with himself are played out - depends upon its lack of material being, upon the fact that the double is and remains a phantasy. Everyone may dream - and everyone no doubt does dream all his life long - of a perfect duplicate, or perfect multiple copies, of his own being; but the strength of such copies lies precisely in their dream quality, and is lost as soon as any attempt is made to force dream into reality. The same is true of the (primal) scene of seduction, which is effective only so long as it is a phantasy, something re-remembered - so long as it is never real. Ours is the only period ever to have sought to exorcize this phantasy (along with others) - that is, to turn it into flesh and blood, to transform the operation of the double from a subtle interplay involving death and the Other into the bland eternity of the Same.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

“If you could establish your empires and settler colonial nations through ethnic cleansing massacres and land theft, then it is discrimination to say that we cannot. If you cleared your land of its Indigenous inhabitants, ... then it is anti-Semitic to say that we cannot.”
― Naomi Klein

“Em alguma altura da vida todos nós recorremos a um duplo.”
― José Eduardo Agualusa, The Book of Chameleons