Quotes About Perception

the younger crowd for whom I now felt a contempt such as only a disillusioned dreamer feels for those still unaware that they dream...

Here I had thought they accepted me because they felt that color made no difference, when in reality it made no difference because they didn't see either color or men Ã¢â'¬Â¦ For all they were concerned, we were so many names scribbled on fake ballots, to be used at their convenience and when not needed to be filed away. It was a joke, an absurd joke.

You ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world, that you're part of all the sound and anguish

that's when you got your first peep through the crack in the wall of life and saw hell laughing like a gang of drunk farmers watching a dogfight on a country road.

And yet, it was a strangely satisfying experience for an invisible man to hear the silence of sound.

No, you could never tell where you were going, that was a sure thing. The only sure thing. Nor could you tell how you'd get there—though when you arrived it was somehow right.

Ralph Ellison

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

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.

I recalled a report of a shoe-shine boy who had encountered the best treatment in the South simply by wearing a white turban instead of his usual Dobbs or Stetson, and I fell into a fit of laughing.

Then too, you're constantly being bumped against by those of poor vision. Or again, you doubt if you really exist. You wonder whether you aren't simply a phantom in other people's minds. Say, a figure in a nightmare which the sleeper tries with all his strength to destroy.

I could see it now, see it clearly and in growing magnitude. It was not suicide, but murder. The committee had planned it.

They were blind, bat blind, moving only by the echoed sounds of their own voices.

Irresponsibility is part of my invisibility; any way you face it, it is a denial. But to whom can I be responsible, and why should I be, when you refuse to see me?

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, not even I. I've never been more loved than when I tried to 'justify' and affirm someone's mistaken beliefs.

I had accepted the accepted attitudes and it had made life seem simple. But not anymore.

in the world is the spectacle of the whites busy escaping blackness and becoming blacker every day, and the blacks striving toward whiteness, becoming quite dull and gray. None of us seems to know who he is or where he's going.

Poor stumblers, neither of you can see the other. To you he is a mark on the scorecard of achievement, a thing and not a man; a child, or even less - a black amorphous thing. And you, for all your power, are not a man to him, but a God, a force -

Ellison gave our age a new metaphor for social alienation. His definition of invisibility is so common now, so much a part of the culture and language—like a coin handled by millions—that it is automatically invoked when we talk about the situation of black Americans and any social group we willingly refuse to see.

I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest.

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.

But not quite, for actually it is only the known, the seen, the heard and only those events that the recorder regards as important that are put down, those lies his keepers keep their power by.

Irresponsibility is part of my invisibility; any way you face it, it is a denial. But to whom can I be responsible, and why should I be, when you refuse to see me? And wait until I reveal how truly irresponsible I am. Responsibility rests upon recognition, and recognition is a form of agreement.

Why do you laugh?" he said. "Because at a price I now see that which I couldn't see," I said.