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Start by following Ralph Ellison.
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“When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.”
― Invisible Man
― Invisible Man
“What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?”
― Invisible Man
― Invisible Man
“Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.”
― Invisible Man
― Invisible Man
“The world is a possibility if only you'll discover it.”
― Invisible Man
― Invisible Man
“I am an invisible man. No I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allen Poe: Nor am I one of your Hollywood movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids, and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, simply because people refuse to see me.”
― Invisible Man
― Invisible Man
“I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves or figments of their imagination, indeed, everything and anything except me.”
― Invisible Man
― Invisible Man
“I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest. Or when, even as just now I've tried to articulate exactly what I felt to be the truth. No one was satisfied”
― Invisible Man
― Invisible Man
“Power doesn't have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it.”
― Invisible Man
― Invisible Man
“And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone's way but my own.”
― Invisible Man
― Invisible Man
“I remember that I'm invisible and walk softly so as not awake the sleeping ones. Sometimes it is best not to awaken them; there are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.”
― Invisible Man
― Invisible Man
“It goes a long way back, some twenty years. All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naive. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself. But first I had to discover that I am an invisible man!”
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“Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.”
― Invisible Man
― Invisible Man
“I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself.”
― Invisible Man
― Invisible Man
“And I knew that it was better to live out one's absurdity than to die for that of others.”
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“Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?”
― Invisible Man
― Invisible Man
“I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.”
― Invisible Man
― Invisible Man
“I was pulled this way and that for longer than I can remember. And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone's way but my own. I have also been called one thing and then another while no one really wished to hear what I called myself. So after years of trying to adopt the opinions of others I finally rebelled. I am an invisible man.”
― Invisible Man
― Invisible Man
“Play the game, but don’t believe in it â€� that much you owe yourself â€� Play the game, but raise the ante, my boy. Learn how it operates, learn how you operate.”
― Invisible Man
― Invisible Man
“For, like almost everyone else in our country, I started out with my share of optimism. I believed in hard work and progress and action, but now, after first being 'for' society and then 'against' it, I assign myself no rank or any limit, and such an attitude is very much against the trend of the times. But my world has become one of infinite possibilities. What a phrase - still it's a good phrase and a good view of life, and a man shouldn't accept any other; that much I've learned underground. Until some gang succeeds in putting the world in a strait jacket, its definition is possibility.”
― Invisible Man
― Invisible Man
“I feel the need to reaffirm all of it, the whole unhappy territory and all the things loved and unloveable in it, for it is all part of me.”
― Invisible Man
― Invisible Man
“Whence all this passion towards conformity anyway? Diversity is the word. Let man keep his many parts and you will have no tyrant states. Why, if they follow this conformity business, they'll end up by forcing me, an invisible man, to become white, which is not a color but the lack of one. Must I strive towards colorlessness? But seriously and without snobbery, think of what the world would lose if that should happen. America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.”
― Invisible Man
― Invisible Man
“The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.”
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“The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.”
― Living with Music: Jazz Writings
― Living with Music: Jazz Writings
“Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.”
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“We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.”
― Shadow and Act
― Shadow and Act
“So why do I write, torturing myself to put it down? Because in spite of myself I've learned some things. Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled "file and forget," and I can neither file nor forget. Nor will certain ideas forget me; they keep filing away at my lethargy, my complacency. Why should I be the one to dream this nightmare?”
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―
“I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids -- and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination -- indeed, everything and anything except me.”
― Invisible Man
― Invisible Man
“And the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived. That goes for societies as well as for individuals.”
― Invisible Man
― Invisible Man
“Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.”
― Invisible Man
― Invisible Man
“America is woven of many strands. I would recognise them and let it so remain. Our fate is to become one, and yet many.”
― Invisible Man
― Invisible Man