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RALPH ELLISON
American author
(1914 - 1994)
  CHECK READING LIST (2)  

Education is all a matter of building bridges.
      - [Education]

I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allen 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. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination indeed, everything except me.
      - Invisible Man (prologue)
        [Books (First Lines)]

It goes a long way back, some twenty years. 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 naive. 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. But first I had to discover that I am an invisible man!
      - The Invisible Man (ch. 1)
        [Books (First Lines)]

Last Revised: 2007 January 1
Copyright © 1999-2007 John C. Shepard. All Rights Reserved.
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