W.E.B. Du Bois: “New York and morning: the sun is kissing the timid dew in Central Park, and from the Fountain of Plenty one looks along…”

And yet, being a problem is a strange experience,—peculiar even for one who has never been anything else, save perhaps in babyhood and in Europe.

But they should not keep these prizes, I said; some, all, I would wrest from them.

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.

Alas, with the years all this fine contempt began to fade; for the words I longed for, and all their dazzling opportunities, were theirs, not mine.