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Quotes from Invisible Man — Ralph Ellison

1913–1994 United States

← All quotes by Ralph Ellison

37 quotes

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 (1952)

Play the game, but don't believe in it.

Invisible Man (1952)

If only all the contradictory voices shouting inside my head would calm down and sing a song in unison, whatever it was I wouldn't care so long as they sang without dissonance.

Invisible Man (1952)

[T]here's always an element of crime in freedom.

Invisible Man (1952)

Perhaps everyone loved someone; I didn't know, I couldn't give much thought to love; in order to travel far you had to be detached, and I had a long road back to the campus before me.

Invisible Man (1952)

[T]he world is possibility if only you'll discover it.

Invisible Man (1952)

When I discover who I am, I'll be free.

Invisible Man (1952)

And yet I am what they think I am.

Invisible Man (1952)

And while the ice was melting to form a flood in which I threatened to drown I awoke one afternoon to find that my first northern winter had set.

Invisible Man (1952)

Sometimes I feel the need to reaffirm all of it, the whole unhappy territory and all the things loved and unlovable in it, for all of it is part of me.

Invisible Man (1952)

[T]o hell with being ashamed of what you liked.

Invisible Man (1952)

They were very much the same, each attempting to force his picture of reality upon me and neither giving a hoot in hell for how things looked to me.

Invisible Man (1952)

[T]here are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.

Invisible Man (1952)

[T]he end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.

Invisible Man (1952)

I recall the sudden arpeggios of laughter lilting across the tender, springtime grass — gay-welling, far-floating, fluent, spontaneous, a bell-like feminine fluting, then suppressed; as though snuffed swiftly and irrevocably beneath the quiet solemnity of the vespered air now vibrant with somber chapel bells.

Invisible Man (1952)

[T]he world is just as concrete, ornery, vile, and sublimely wonderful as before, only now I better understand my relation to it and it to me.

Invisible Man (1952)

So she doesn't think Iʼm black enough. What does she want, a black-face comedian? [...] Maybe she wants to see me sweat coal tar, ink, shoe polish, graphite. What was I, a man or a natural resource?

Invisible Man (1952)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Ralph Ellison (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.