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?

Ralph Ellison
Some Similar Quotes
  1. I belong to the people I love, and they belong to me--they, and the love and loyaty I give them, form my identity far more than any word or group ever could. - Veronica Roth

  2. It answers the question that was tormenting you: my love, you are not 'one thing in my life' - not even the most important - because my life no longer belongs to me because...you are always me. - JeanPaul Sartre

  3. You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity. At some time, every creature which lives must do so. It is the ultimate shadow, the defeat of... - Philip K. Dick

  4. Droll thing life is -- that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself -- that comes too late -- a crop of inextinguishable regrets. - Joseph Conrad

  5. Treat everyone you meet as if they were you. - Doug Dillon

More Quotes By Ralph Ellison
  1. Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.

  2. I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest. Or when, even as just now I've tried to articulate exactly what I felt to be the truth. No one was satisfied

  3. But what a feeling can come over a man just from seeing the things he believes in and hopes for symbolized in the concrete form of a man. In something that gives a focus to all the other things he knows to be real. Something...

  4. God is love, I said, but art's the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.

  5. I was no longer afraid. Not of important men, not of trustees and such; for knowing now that there was nothing which I could expect from them, there was no reason to be afraid.

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