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 wa… - Ralph Ellison

All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was.

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 naïve. 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.

Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are. That must be it, I thought — to lose your direction is to lose your face.

Nothing, storm or flood, must get in the way of our need for light and ever more and brighter light. The truth is the light and light is the truth.

...she was something more- a force, a stable, familiar force like something out of my past which kept me from whirling off into some unknown which I dared not face. It was a most painful position for at the same time Mary reminded me constantly that something was expected of me, some act of leadership, some newsworthy achievement;...