63 quotes
[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)
Perhaps the novel evolved in order to deal with man's growing awareness that behind the facade of social organisations, manners, customs, myths, rituals and religions of the post-Christian era lies chaos.
[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)
Our task then is always to challenge the apparent forms of reality—that is, the fixed meaning and values of the few—and to struggle with it until it reveals its mad, vari-implicated chaos, its false faces, and on until it surrenders its insight, its truth.
Brave Words for a Startling Occasion (1953)
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)
Let's not play these kids cheap; let's find out what they have that is a strength. What do they have that you can approach and build a bridge upon? Education is all a matter of building bridges, it seems to me.
What These Children Are Like (1963)
[T]he end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
Invisible Man (1952)
All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority. The universal in the novel—and isn't that what we're all clamoring for these days?—is reached only through the depiction of the specific man in a specific circumstance.
Perhaps the most insidious and least understood form of segregation is that of the word.[…] For if the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to blind, imprison and destroy.
Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity (1953)
If you can show me how I can cling to that which is real to me, while teaching me a way into the larger society, then I will not only drop my defenses and my hostility, but I will sing your praises and help you to make the desert bear fruit.
What These Children Are Like (1963)
Deep at the dark bottom of the melting pot, where the private is public and the public private, where black is white and white black, where the immoral becomes moral and the moral is anything that makes one feel good (or that one has the power to sustain), the white man's relish is apt to be the black man's gall.
Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke (1958)
But what a feeling can come over a man just from seeing the things he believes in and hopes for symbolized in the concrete form of a man. In something that gives a focus to all the other things he knows to be real. Something that makes unseen things manifest and allows him to come to his hopes and dreams through his outer eye and through the touch and feel of his natural hand.
Three Days Before the Shooting (2010)
By and large, the critics and readers gave me an affirmed sense of my identity as a writer. You might know this within yourself, but to have it affirmed by others is of utmost importance. Writing is, after all, a form of communication.