Here are a few of the quotes from GoodReads that may help to explain why NC's high rolling Tea Baggers would not want young people to be reading this dangerous book:
“Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
― Ralph Ellison, 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?”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
― Ralph Ellison, 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”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
― Ralph Ellison, 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.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
― Ralph Ellison, 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.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
“And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone's way but my own.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
“Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
― Ralph Ellison, 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.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
― Ralph Ellison, 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.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
― Ralph Ellison, 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.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
― Ralph Ellison, 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.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
― Ralph Ellison, 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.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
“Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
― Ralph Ellison, 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.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
“I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
― Ralph Ellison, 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 extoplasms. 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.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
“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.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
“Perhaps everyone loved someone; I didn't now, I couldn't give much thought to love; in order to travel far you had to be detached, and I had the long road back to the campus before me.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
“Everywhere I've turned somebody has wanted to sacrifice me for my own good—only /they/ were the ones who benefited. And now we start on the old sacrificial merry-go-round. At what point do we stop?”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
tags: sacrifice
“The clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
“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.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
“Man's hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
“All it takes to get along in this here man's town is a little shit, grit, and mother-wit.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
“I felt that even when they were polite they hardly saw me, that they would have begged the pardon of Jack the Bear, never glancing his way if the bear happened to be walking along minding his business. It was confusing. I did not know if it was desirable or undesirable...”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
“I'd like to hear five recordings of Louis Armstrong playing and singing "What Did I Do to Be so Black and Blue"-all at the same time. Sometimes now I listen to Louis while I have my favorite dessert of vanilla ice cream and sloe gin. I pour the red liquid over the white mound, watching it glisten and the vapor rising as Louis bends that military instrument into a beam of lyrical sound.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
“I denounce because though implicated and partially responsible, I have been hurt to the point of abysmal pain, hurt to the point of invisibility. And I defend because in spite of it all, I find that I love.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
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