Quotes About Awareness

I am standing puzzled, unable to decide whether the veil is really being lifted, or lowered more firmly in place; whether I am witnessing a revelation or a more efficient blinding.

To see around corners is enough (that is not unusual when you are invisible). But to hear around them is too much; it inhibits action.

For their most innocent words were acts of violence to which we of the campus were hypersensitive though we endured them not.

That invisibility to which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come in contact. A matter of the construction of their INNER eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality.

All boundaries down, freedom was not only the recognition of necessity, it was the recognition of possibility.

That invisibility to which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come in contact. A matter of the construction of their inner eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality. I am not complaining, nor am I protesting either. It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.

I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.

Now, aware of my invisibility, I live rent-free in a building rented strictly to whites, in a section of the basement that was shut off and forgotten during the nineteenth century, which I discovered when I was trying to escape in the night from Ras the Destroyer. But that's getting too far ahead of the story, almost to the end, although the end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.

Without light I am not only invisible, but formless as well; and to be unaware of one's form is to live a death.

Without light I am not only invisible, but formless as well; and to be unaware of one's form is to live a death. I myself, after existing some twenty years, did not become alive until I discovered my invisibility.

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

Responsibility rests upon recognition, and recognition is a form of agreement.

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.

Ralph Ellison

Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled "file and forget," and I can neither file nor forget.

Still it was nothing new, white folks seemed always to expect you to know those things which they'd done everything they could think of to prevent you from knowing.

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.

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

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.

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

if you don't, you're already dead anyway. Now hush, because you're simply thinking words, old saws. So hush…all is noise.

Well, I was and yet I was invisible, that was the fundamental contradiction. I was and yet I was unseen. It was frightening and as I sat there I sensed another frightening world of possibilities.