Ralph Ellison

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

Man's hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or a moaning dove.

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 naïve. 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.

It's when you feel like this that, out of resentment, you begin to bump people back. And, let me confess, you feel that way most of the time. You ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world, that you're a part of all the sound and anguish, and you strike out with your fists, you curse and you swear to make them recognize you. And, alas, it's seldom successful.

It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.

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.

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

The truth is the light and light is the truth.

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

I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time been ashamed.

A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.

Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.