Quotes from book

Invisible Man

“America is woven of many strands; I would recognize them and let it so remain. It's "winner take nothing" that is the great truth of our country or of any country. Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat. Our fate is to become one, and yet many— This is not prophecy, but description.”

“For now I had begun to believe, despite all the talk of science around me, that there was a magic in spoken words.”

“Perhaps everyone loved someone; I didn't know, I couldn't give much thought to love; in order to travel far you had to be detached, and I had a long road back to the campus before me.”

“And yet I am what they think I am.”

“I denounce because though implicated and partially responsible, I have been hurt to the point of abysmal pain, hurt to the point of invisibility. And I defend because in spite of all I find that I love. In order to get some of it down I have to love. I sell you no phony forgiveness, I'm a desperate man—but too much of your life will be lost, its meaning lost, unless you approach it as much through love as through hate. So I approach it through division. So I denounce and I defend and I hate and I love.”

“The clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.”

“…you both fail to understand what is happening to you. You cannot see or hear or smell the truth of what you see — and you, looking for destiny! It’s classic! And the boy, this automaton, he was made of the very mud of the region and sees far less than you. Poor stumblers, neither of you can see the other. To you he is a mark on the score-card of your 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…”

“…to hell with being ashamed of what you liked.”

“…there's always an element of crime in freedom.”

“The truth is the light and light is the truth.”

“It's when you feel like this that, out of resentment, you begin to bump people back. And, let me confess, you feel that way most of the time. You ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world, that you're a part of all the sound and anguish, and you strike out with your fists, you curse and you swear to make them recognize you. And, alas, it's seldom successful.”

“Whence all this passion toward conformity anyway?—diversity is the word.”

“And while the ice was melting to form a flood in which I threatened to drown I awoke one afternoon to find that my first northern winter had set.”

“If only all the contradictory voices shouting inside my head would calm down and sing a song in unison, whatever it was I wouldn't care so long as they sang without dissonance.”

“Play the game, but don't believe in it.”

“…there are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.”

“…the world is just as concrete, ornery, vile, and sublimely wonderful as before, only now I better understand my relation to it and it to me.”

“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.”

“Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled "File and forget."”