“I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.”

— Ralph Ellison, book Invisible Man

Source: Invisible Man (1952), Chapter 1.
Context: All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naïve. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself.

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Ralph Ellison82

American novelist, literary critic, scholar and writer 1914–1994

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