Quotes About Invisibility

When you have no voice, you don't exist

Sometimes I come to hate people because they can't see where I am. I've gone empty, completely empty and all they see is the visual form; my arms and legs, my face, my height and posture, the sounds that come from my throat.

We can't see around walls, we can't see heat or cold, we can't see electricity or radio signals, we can't see at a distance. It is a sense so limited that we might as well not have it, yet we have evolved to depend so heavily on it as a species that all other perception has atrophied.

As long as I can make them laugh, it doesn't matter how, I'll be all right. If I succeed in that, the human beings probably won't mind it too much if I remain outside their lives. The one thing I must avoid is becoming offensive in their eyes: I shall be nothing, the wind, the sky.

The more attention you seek the more invisibility you reap

A great wind swept over the ghetto, carrying away shame, invisibility and four centuries of humiliation. But when the wind dropped people saw it had been only a little breeze, friendly, almost gentle.

It is very annoying, when people notice your weak moments but never see your strong ones.

Because what were older women meant to do with themselves, besides prop up everybody else's lives and drink too much wine at book club meetings? No one, Laura was convinced, was as invisible and as easily dismissed as the tribe of women like herself, with short gray hair and glasses.

When a philosophical thought expresses a concept of what it then names "God," this concept functions exactly as an idol. It gives itself to be seen, but thus all the better conceals itself as the mirror where thought, invisibly, has its forward point fixed, so that the invisable finds itself, with an aim suspended by the fixed concept, disqualified and abandoned

But a deeper transition affected people of color in this dazed context. Before course selections and extra-curricular sign-up sheets, before bags could even be unpacked in rooms, black students had to situate themselves within their own race. The process was complicated, conflicting, usually silent, highly fraught, and wholly invisible to their white classmates. Most of whom had never actively had to consider the role of race in their lives.

Become a type, no one saw you. Paranoid thought: What better disguise? But disguise for what?

The map had been the first form of misdirection, for what was a map but a way of emphasizing some things and making other things invisible?

He was a past master of making himself seem insignificant, of seeming invisible.

Aside from my cockeyed internal compass, I also have a shortage of personal coolness, which can be a liability in travel. I have never learned how to arrange my face into that blank expression of competent invisibility that is so useful when traveling in dangerous, foreign places. You know - that super-relaxed, totally-in-charge expression which makes you look like you belong there, anywhere, everywhere, even in the middle of riot in Jakarta.

Ann has a preternatural ability to render herself very small—nearly invisible—in order to better observe the world around her in safe anonymity, so that she can write about it, unnoticed. In other words, her superpower is to conceal her superpowers.

but she was old, and old women do tend to get pushed aside at big gatherings—even when they have footed the bill for that gathering.

I watched you for years," she whispered. The tears were drying on her cheeks, and heat was building within her. If he would just touch her. Touch her there. "I watched you and you never saw me.

Nobody listened. Nobody took any notice of Mrs Wilkins. She was the kind of person who is not noticed at parties. Her clothes, infested by thrift, made her practically invisible, her face was non-arresting, her conversation was reluctant, she was shy. And if one's clothes and face and conversation are all negligible, though Mrs Wilkins – who recognised her disabilities – what, at parties, is there left of one?

This is the paradox of being white and 'seeing white', but being to all intents and purposes 'invisible' or, more appropriately, as Frankenberg, Garner, and other sociologists of 'whiteness' have suggested, 'unmarked'. In Western societies

We move from one invisibility to another.

De vegades soc invisible, diu la nena. En determinades botigues, restaurants, cues per comprar bitllets o supermercats, o fins i tot en llocs on de fet parlo molt fort, demano informació en una estació o coses així. La gent pot veure a través meu. Alguns blancs, en concret, poden veure a través dels joves i també dels negres o mestissos com si no hi fóssim.

Certain white people in particular can look right through young people and also black and mixed race people like we aren't here.

Who wants to see us anyway?

She could die now; no one would see it, her.