Quotes About Individuality

Perhaps simple to be known, to be looked upon by so many people, to be the focal point of so many concentrating eyes, perhaps this was enough to make one different; enough to transform one into something else, someone else; just as by becoming and increasingly larger boy one became one day a man.

He's only a man. Remember that. He's only a man!

Play the game, but play it your own way – part of the time at least. Play the game, but raise the ante, my boy. Learn how it operates, learn how you operate.

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.

When I discover who I am, I'll be free." ? Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

I yam what I yam!

and knowing now who I was and where I was and knowing too that I had no longer to run for or from the Jack's and the Emerson's and the Bledsoe's and the Norton's...but only from their confusion and impatience and refusal to recognize the beautiful absurdity of their American identity...and mine...

So still and silent that they clash with the crowd in their very immobility; standing noisy in their silence; harsh as a cry of terror in their quietness.

Besides, I might as well admit right now, I thought, that there are many things about people like Mary that I dislike. For one thing, they seldom know where their personalities end and yours begins; they usually think in terms of we while I have always tended to think in terms of me--and that has caused some friction, even with my own family.

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.

Ralph Ellison

Let man keep his many parts and you'll have no tyrant states.

Our fate is to become one, and yet many— This is not prophecy, but description.

Come out of the fog, young man. And remember you don't have to be a complete fool in order to succeed. Play the game, but don't believe in it—that much you owe yourself. Even if it lands you in a strait jacket or a padded cell. Play the game, but play it your own way—part of the time at least. Play the game, but raise the ante, my boy. Learn how it operates, learn how you operate—I wish I had time to tell you only a fragment.

The unheard sounds came through, and each melodic line existed of itself, stood out clearly from all the rest, said its piece, and waited patiently for the other voices to speak.

I had switched from the arrogant absurdity of Norton and Emerson to that of Jack and the Brotherhood, and it all came out the same—except I now recognized my invisibility. So I'd accept it, I'd explore it, rine and heart. I'd

Identity! My God! Who has any identity anymore anyway?

All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was...I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.

What a group of people we were, I thought. Why, you could cause us the greatest humiliation simply by confronting us with something we liked. Not all of us, but so many.

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? What a waste, what a senseless waste!

Shouldn't there be some way for us to be asked to sing? Shouldn't the short man have the right to make a mistake without his motives being considered consciously or unconsciously malicious?

Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.

Envy is ignorance, Imitation is Suicide.

To be great is to be misunderstood.