Invisible Man Identity Quotes

When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.

..and knowing now who I was and where I was and knowing too that I had no longer to run for or from the Jack's and the Emerson's and the Bledsoe's and the Norton's...but only from their confusion and impatience and refusal to recognize the beautiful absurdity of their American identity...and mine...

The four borders of the Taj Mahal are designed to be identical, as if there were a mirror situated on one side, though one can never tell on which one. Stone reflected in the water. God reflected in human beings. Love reflected in heartbreak. Truth reflected in stories. We live, toil and die under the same invisible dome. Rich and poor, Mohammedan and baptized, free and slave, man and woman, Sultan and mahout, master and apprentice … I have come to believe that if there is one shape that reaches out to all of us, it is the dome. That is where all the distinctions disappear and every single sound, whether of joy or sorrow, merges into one huge silence of all-encompassing love. When I think of this world in such a way, I feel dazed and disoriented, and cannot tell any longer where the future begins and the past ends; where the West falls and the East rises.

Anger is what makes our struggle visible, and our struggle is what exposes they hypocrisy of a nation that fashions itself a moral leader. To rise against the narrative and expose the lie gives opportunity to those whose identity depends on the lie to question and, hopefully, change.

Man searches constantly for identity, he thought as he trotted along the gravel path. He has no real proof of this existence except for the reaction of other people to that fact. So he listens very closely to what people say to one another about him, whether it's good or bad, because it indicates that he lives in the same world they do, and that all his fears about being invisible, impotent, lacking some mysterious dimension that other people have, are groundless.

When you have been so used, as a white man, to white and male going without saying, it’s understandable that you might forget that white and male is an identity too.

Our feelings about menstruation are the image of what it is to be a woman in this culture. While menstruation and the fear of revealing evidence of loss of body control bear possibilities of humiliation for women of which men are not aware, it is humiliating too to be that sex whose voice and presence carry less significance. It is humiliating to speak the same words as a man and have his heard, and not yours. It is humiliating to feel invisible when God gave you a body as solid as his. It is humiliating that women are accorded little dignity unless they are married. We twist these humiliations around, of course, and say it is glorious to have a man fight our battles for us, put us on a pedestal, take care of us. It is, if you enjoy being dependent on someone else.

I met a man named Birthday. I didn’t tell him when I was born, because I thought that that one day in my life, a day I don’t even remember, might define his own identity, and I didn’t want to make him cry.

Anger is what makes our struggle visible, and our struggle is what exposes the hypocrisy of a nation that fashions itself a moral leader. To rise against the narrative and expose the lie gives opportunity to those whose identity depends on the lie to question and, hopefully, change.

Bumblebees detect the polarization of sunlight, invisible to uninstrumented humans; put vipers sense infrared radiation and detect temperature differences of 0.01C at a distance of half a meter; many insects can see ultraviolet light; some African freshwater fish generate a static electric field around themselves and sense intruders by slight perturbations induced in the field; dogs, sharks, and cicadas detect sounds wholly inaudible to humans; ordinary scorpions have micro--seismometers on their legs so they can detect in darkness the footsteps of a small insect a meter away; water scorpions sense their depth by measuring the hydrostatic pressure; a nubile female silkworm moth releases ten billionths of a gram of sex attractant per second, and draws to her every male for miles around; dolphins, whales, and bats use a kind of sonar for precision echo-location. The direction, range, and amplitude of sounds reflected by to echo-locating bats are systematically mapped onto adjacent areas of the bat brain. How does the bat perceive its echo-world? Carp and catfish have taste buds distributed over most of their bodies, as well as in their mouths; the nerves from all these sensors converge on massive sensory processing lobes in the brain, lobes unknown in other animals. how does a catfish view the world? What does it feel like to be inside its brain? There are reported cases in which a dog wags its tail and greets with joy a man it has never met before; he turns out to be the long-lost identical twin of the dog's "master", recognizable by his odor. What is the smell-world of a dog like? Magnetotactic bacteria contain within them tiny crystals of magnetite - an iron mineral known to early sailing ship navigators as lodenstone. The bacteria literally have internal compasses that align them along the Earth's magnetic field. The great churning dynamo of molten iron in the Earth's core - as far as we know, entirely unknown to uninstrumented humans - is a guiding reality for these microscopic beings. How does the Earth's magnetism feel to them? All these creatures may be automatons, or nearly so, but what astounding special powers they have, never granted to humans, or even to comic book superheroes. How different their view of the world must be, perceiving so much that we miss.

It is precisely when their interior worlds change shape that Bezukhov and Bolkonsky are confirmed as individuals; that they surprise; that they make themselves different; that their freedom catches fire, and with it the identity of their selves; these are moments of poetry: they experience them with such intensity that the whole world rushes forward to meet them with an intoxicating parade of wondrous details. In Tolstoy, man is the more himself, the more an individual, when he has the strength, the imagination, the intelligence, to transform himself. By contrast, the people I see changing their attitude toward Lenin, Europe, and so on expose their nonindividuality. This change is neither their own creation nor their own invention, not caprice or surprise or thought or madness; it has no poetry; it is nothing but a very prosaic adjustment to the changing spirit of History. That is why they don't even notice it; in the final analysis, they always stay the same: always in the right, always thinking what, in their milieu, a person is supposed to think; they change not in order to draw closer to some essential self but in order to merge with everyone else; changing lets them stay unchanged. Another way of expressing it: they change their mind in accordance with the invisible tribunal that is also changing its mind; their change is thus simply a bet on what the tribunal will proclaim to be the truth tomorrow.

RAS, eh Brutus.  Reticular Activating System. James put a lot of weight in RAS.  Once his mind was made of aware of something, it was like his mind expanded.  Was able to see more of the big picture. RAS was a natural phenomenon.  Medically it was described as the ability of the mind to have a heightened sense of bodily and behavioral alertness.  Everyone had it. You buy a car.  One that you think is slightly unique, maybe because of its model or color.  The second you get on the road, though, you start seeing identical cars to yours everywhere.  Seems like everyone owns a champagne-colored Jetta. Thing was—they were always there.  You just never noticed them.  They weren’t on your radar.  To you they were invisible.  Invisible until you bought one. RAS.

Elliott was disarmingly bright, according to everyone who knew him, an avid reader of Dostoevsky, Kafka, Beckett, Stendhal, Freud, the Buddha, all of whom destabilized notions of identity. I think he knew how little we know about who we are. The idea comes through in lyrics. “I don’t know who I am,” he says simply; at times he wishes he were no one. He’s a stickman shooting blanks at emptiness, living with “one dimension dead.” He’s an invisible man with a see-through mind. He’s a junkyard full of false starts. He’s a ghost-writer, feeling hollow.

I’m the kid (and the man) who doesn’t raise his hand. Whenever I do, I regret it. Better to keep quiet, to work out my rejection with fear and trembling, and to keep hunting for a safe place where I’m never confronted with my own insignificance. And yet, at war with that desire to be invisible is a yearning to be seen and known and valued.

it is exactly their whiteness and maleness that caused them to seriously vocalise the logical absurdity that identities exist only for those who happen not to be white or male. When you have been so used, as a white man, to white and male going without saying, it’s understandable that you might forget that white and male is an identity too.

I had no doubt that I could do something, but what, and how? I had no contacts and I believed in nothing. And the obsession with my identity which I had developed in the factory hospital returned with a vengeance. Who was I, how had I come to be? Certainly I couldn’t help being different from when I left the campus; but now a new, painful, contradictory voice had grown up within me, and between its demands for revengeful action and Mary’s silent pressure I throbbed with guilt and puzzlement. I wanted peace and quiet, tranquillity, but was too much aboil inside. Somewhere beneath the load of the emotion-freezing ice which my life had conditioned my brain to produce, a spot of black anger glowed and threw off a hot red light of such intensity that had Lord Kelvin known of its existence, he would have had to revise his measurements.

At a time which seemed to him as far distant as the dim and distant past of his ancestors, his father, Okumana, the man who could make better spear tips than anyone else, had explained to him that there was always a way out of any situation, as long as one was alive. Death was the last hiding place. That was something to keep in reserve until there was no other way of avoiding an apparently insuperable threat. There were always escape routes that were not immediately obvious, and that was why humans, unlike animals, had a brain. In order to look inward, not outward. Inward, toward the secret places where the spirits of one’s ancestors were waiting to act as a man’s guide through life. Who am I? he thought. A human being who has lost his identity is no longer a human being. He is an animal. That’s what has happened to me. I started to kill people because I myself was dead. When I was a child and saw the signs, the accursed signs telling the blacks where they were allowed to go and what existed exclusively for the whites, I started to be diminished even then. A child should grow, grow bigger; but in my country a black child had to learn how to grow smaller and smaller. I saw my parents succumb to their own invisibility, their own accumulated bitterness. I was an obedient child and learned to be a nobody among nobodies. Apartheid was my real father. I learned what no one should need to learn. To live with falsehood, contempt, a lie elevated to the only truth in my country. A lie enforced by the police and laws, but above all by a flood of white water, a torrent of words about the natural differences between white and black, the superiority of white civilization. That superiority turned me into a murderer, songoma. And I can believe this is the ultimate consequence of learning to grow smaller and smaller as a child. For what has this apartheid, this falsified white superiority been but a systematic plundering of our souls? When our despair exploded in furious

It’s a meaningful shift in language that no longer places the burden of bravery on the marginalized to “come out” to a hostile world. “Inviting in” recognizes that it isn’t the marginalized who should be responsible for the terms of their own identity, but those who have made that identity dangerous to embrace. But

What and how much had I lost by trying to do what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do? What a waste, what a senseless waste! But what of those things which you actually didn't like, not because you were not supposed to like them, not because to dislike them was considered a mark of refinement and education—but because you actually found them distasteful? The very idea annoyed me. How could you know? It involved a problem of choice. I would have to weigh many things carefully before deciding and there would be some things that would cause quite a bit of trouble, simply because I had never formed a personal attitude toward so much. I had accepted attitudes and it had made life seem simple...

Identity! My God! Who has any identity anymore anyway?

No one can foretell how effective this exorcism will be, but we have to ask the question: what is it - what even worse eventuality (the total hegemony of the genetic code?) - that cancer is resisting? What is it - what even worse eventuality (a sexual epidemic, total sexual promiscuity?) - that AIDS is resisting? The drugs problem is the same: all dramatizing apart, we have to ask what it is protecting us from, what kind of escape route it represents from an even worse evil (rational stupefaction, normative sociability, universal regimentation). We may say the same of terrorism: isn't its secondary, reactional, abreactional violence protecting us from an epidemic of consensus, from a growing political leukaemia and deliquescence, and the invisible transparency of the State? Everything is ambiguous and reversible. After all, it is by neurosis that man protects himself most effectively from madness.In this sense, AIDS is not a punishment from on high; it might rather be a defensive emotional reaction of the species against the danger of a total promiscuity, a total loss of identity in the proliferation and acceleration of the networks. If AIDS , terrorism, economic collapse and electronic viruses are concerns not just for the police, medicine , science and the experts, but for the entire collective imagination , this is because there is more to them than mere episodic events in an irrational world. They embody the entire logic of our system, and are merely, so to speak, the points at which that logic crystallizes spectacularly. Their power is a power of irradiation and their effect, through the media , within the imagination, is itself a viral one.

Perfume is to smells what eroticism is to sex: an aesthetic, cultural, emotional elaboration of the raw materials provided by nature. The ladies of the court, led by Marie-Antoinette, resorted to the only thing that could keep them one step ahead of the commoners, however wealthy they were: fashion. In fact, this is how fashion as we know it came into existence: the latest trend adopted by a happy few for a season before trickling down to the middle classes. Just a touch of the negligence etudiee that distinguishes chic Parisian women from their fiercely put-together New Yorker or Milanese counterparts. Perfume needs to be supported by image. You're not just doing it to smell good: you're perpetuating a ritual of erotic magic that's been scaring and enticing men in equal measure for millennia. Perfumes are our subconscious. They read us more revealingly than any other choice of adornment, perhaps because their very invisibility deludes us into thinking we can get away with the message they carry. These scents severed fragrance from its function as an extension of a female or male persona - the rugged guy, the innocent waif or the femme fatale - to turn it into a thing that was beautiful, interesting and evocative in and of itself. Perfume's advertising relies on the 3 aspiration S: stars, sex and seduction, with a side helping of dreams or exoticism. Descriptions, impressions, analogies, short stories, snippets or real-life testing, bits of history, parallels with music or literature. Connecting a scent with emotions, impressions, atmospheres, isn't that why we wear it? Isn't it all subjective? Just because you don't want it in your life doesn't make it bad. And it's not entirely impossible to consider perfumes beyond their "like/don't like" status. What intent does t set out to fulfill? How does it achieve its effects? How does it fit in with the history of the brand or its identity? How does it compare to the current season's offerings? Does it bring something new? The story told by the perfumer blends with the ones we tell ourselves about it; with our feelings, our moods, our references, our understanding of it. Once it is released from the bottle, it becomes a new entity. We make it ours: we are the performers of our perfume. Both lust and luxury are coupled in the same Latin word: luxuria is one of the 7 deadly sins. The age-old fear of female sexuality. The lure of beauty, set off by costly and deceitful adornments, could lead men to material and moral ruin but, more frighteningly, suck them into a vortex of erotic voracity. A man's desire waxes and wanes. But how can a woman, whose pleasure is never certain and whose receptive capacity is potentially infinite, ever be controlled?

It was at that point that it hit me like a truck that this man was not presently rational and that I was entirely at his mercy. I became acutely aware of the fact that he was not going to listen to anything that I had to say. This may sound peculiar, given that I was the focus of his brutal actions, but the feeling that came over me then was one of sheer invisibility. I realized that who I was, my personality, my character, my identity, were totally irrelevant to him and completely subsumed by his. It registered then that Robert was intending to rape me and kill me, and that there was nothing that I could do to stop him.

It was exhausting, for no matter what the scheme I conceived, there was one constant flaw—myself. There was no getting around it. I could no more escape than I could think of my identity. Perhaps, I thought, the two things are involved with each other. When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.

Everything I read, listened to, and learned, validated my right to existence as a Black man in America but only within the confines of a patriarchal definition of masculine identity. What went unquestioned were the ways my newfound sense of Black manhood contributed to the ongoing marginalization of my mother, her twin sister, my grandmother, my high school guidance counselor, and more than half of the student population on Hampton University’s campus. I began to see myself, but only by refusing to see black women. The centrality of the Black male experience and the discourse of racist oppression has been passed down from generation to generation through our politics and culture.

There is no point identifying the world. We cannot even identify our own faces, since mirrors impair their symmetry. To see our own face as it is would be madness, since we would no longer have any mystery for ourselves and would, therefore, be annihilated by transparency. Might it not be said that man has evolved into a form such that his face remains invisible to him and he becomes definitively unidentifiable, not only in the mystery of his face, but in any of his desires? But it is the same with any object which reaches us only in a definitively alter-ed state, even when it does so on the screen of science, in the mirrors of information or on the screens of our brains. Thus, all things offer themselves up without a hope of being anything other than illusions of themselves. And it is right that this should be so. Fortunately, the objects which appear to us have always-already disappeared. Fortunately, nothing appears to us in real time, any more than do the stars in the night sky. If the speed of light were infinite, all the stars would be there simultaneously and the celestial vault would be an unbearable incandescence. Fortunately, nothing takes place in real time. Otherwise, we would be subjected, where information is concerned, to the light of all events, and the present would be an unbearable incandescence. Fortunately, we live on the basis of a vital illusion, on the basis of an absence, an unreality, a non-immediacy of things. Fortunately, nothing is instantaneous, simultaneous or contemporary. Fortunately, nothing is present or identical to itself. Fortunately, reality does not take place. Fortunately, the crime is never perfect.

Blake’s was a complex that involved intellect, emotions and even body. For Blake knew the importance of the body as well as Nietzsche; no poet sings the body so frankly (except perhaps Whitman); for, after all, ‘body is only that portion of soul discerned by the five senses’; body has its place in imagination. And the function of imagination was to look inward. In ‘Jerusalem’ Blake avowed his intention: To open the eternal worlds, to open the immortal eyes Of man Inwards, into the worlds of thought, into Eternity. Imagination is the instrument of self-knowledge. But what must be grasped about Blake’s conception is that imagination is not purely emotional or intellectual; for Blake, knowledge involved the whole being, body, emotions, intellect. Los is only a half of Blake’s picture of man’s inner states. The other half is the strange being called ‘the Spectre’: Each man is in his spectre’s power Until the arrival of that hour When his humanity awakes And casts his spectre into the lake... The Spectre is the dead form. He is static consciousness. Los is kinetic, always pushing, expanding. When life recedes, the limits of its activities seem to be alive, just as the dead body looks like the living one. The Spectre is the dead, conscious part of man that he mistakes for himself, the personality, the habits, the identity. ‘Man is not of fixed or enduring form’ Steppenwolf realized, in a moment of insight. But when man is in ‘the Spectre’s power’ (and most of us are, every day) he sees himself and the whole world as of ‘fixed and enduring form’. Blake has defined the two worlds of Hanno Buddenbrooks and Steppenwolf: one is the world of Los; the other of the Spectre. The Spectre is invisible, like a shadow, but when he has the ascendancy in man, everything is solid, unchangeable, stagnant, unreal.

Most curious is the way that Y/surname patterns differ between countries. In Britain, on average, a man who has the same surname as another is significantly more likely to have a similar Y chromosome, and therefore a common ancestor, than he would with someone of a different surname. But there’s a twist: The Y similarity depends on the frequency of the surname within the population. If you are a Smith, for example, the rule does not apply.

Each one has his own identity and wants sympathy, and the ignorance of each is the vacuum that is between us. So, we are drawn together by this invisible action called sympathy. Now make man wise enough to know that he can feel the pains of another, and then you get him outside of matter.