Invisible Man Events Quotes

I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. (Prologue.1)

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-contra...

They were all such a part of that other life that's dead that I can't remember them all. (Time was as I was, but neither that time nor that "I" are any more.) (2.7)

Many of the men had been doctors, lawyers, teachers, Civil Service workers; there were several cooks, a preacher, a politician, and an artist. One very nutty one had been a psychiatrist. Whenever I...

Here within this quiet greenness I possessed the only identity I had ever known, and I was losing it. In this brief moment of passage I became aware of the connection between these lawns and buildi...

For three years I had thought of myself as a man and here with a few words he'd made me as helpless as an infant. (6.82)

Play the game, but play it your own way – part of the time at least. Play the game, but raise the ante, my boy. Learn how it operates, learn how you operate – I wish I had time to tell...

…I remembered something my grandfather had said long ago: Don't let no white man tell you his business, 'cause after he tells you he's liable to git shame he tole it to you and then he'll hate yo...

"Now measure ten drops into the paint…There, that's it, not too goddam fast. Now. You want no more than ten, and no less." Slowly, I measured the glistening black drops, seeing them settle up...

Mother, who was my mother? Mother, the one who screams when you suffer – but who? This was stupid, you always knew your mother's name. Who was it that screamed? Mother? But the scream came fr...

"They're my birthmark," I said. "I yam what I am!" (13.33)

"You must realize immediately that much of our work is opposed. Our discipline demands therefore that we talk to no one and that we avoid situations in which information might be given away unwitti...

They've tried to dispossess us of our manhood and womanhood! Of our childhood and adolescence – You heard the sister's statistics on our infant mortality rate. Don't you know you're lucky to...

No, I thought, shifting my body, they're the same legs on which I've come so far from home. And yet they were somehow new. The new suit imparted a newness to me. It was the clothes and the new name...

And it went so fast and smoothly that it seemed not to happen to me but to someone who actually bore my new name. I almost laughed into the phone when I heard the director of Men's House address me...

Brother, This is advice from a friend who has been watching you closely. Do not go too fast. Keep working for the people but remember that you are one of us and do not forget if you get too big the...

And my mind whirled with forgotten stories of male servants summoned to wash the mistress's back; chauffeurs sharing the masters' wives; Pullman porters invited into the drawing room of rich wives...

Shake him, shake him, you cannot break him For he's Sambo, the dancing, Sambo, the prancing, Sambo, the entrancing, Sambo Boogie Woogie paper doll. And all for twenty-five cents, the quarter part o...

He was around and others like him, but I had looked past him until Clifton's death (or was it Ras?) had made me aware. What on earth was hiding behind the face of things? If dark glasses and a whit...

I looked at the red imprint left by the straps of her bra, thinking, Who's taking revenge on whom? But why be surprised, when that's what they hear all their lives. When it's made into a great powe...

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...