Emma VanDelinder

“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. One feels his two-ness, — 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.”
― W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk

“And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Humanity, like armies in the field, advances at the speed of the slowest.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

“While a few pertinent points have to be marked, the general impression I desire to convey is of a side door crashing open in life's full flight, and a rush of roaring black time drowning with its whipping wind the cry of lone disaster.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita