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.

- Ralph Ellison