Ralph Ellison Quotes (41 Quotes)


    I was pulled this way and that for longer than I can remember. And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone's way but my own. I have also been called one thing and then another while no one really wished to hear what I called myself. So after years of trying to adopt the opinions of others I finally rebelled. I am an invisible man.

    I'd been so fascinated by the notion, that I'd forgotten to measure what it was bringing forth. I'd been asleep, dreaming.

    Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination-indeed, everything and anything except me.

    Man's hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.

    Perhaps everyone loved someone; I didn't now, I couldn't give much thought to love; in order to travel far you had to be detached, and I had the long road back to the campus before me.



    The clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.




    What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?

    And the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived. That goes for societies as well as for individuals.


    And while the ice was melting to form a flood in which I threatened to drown I awoke one afternoon to find that my first northern winter had set.


    I feel the need to reaffirm all of it, the whole unhappy territory and all the things loved and unloveable in it, for it is all part of me.

    I felt that even when they were polite they hardly saw me, that they would have begged the pardon of Jack the Bear, never glancing his way if the bear happened to be walking along minding his business. It was confusing. I did not know if it was desirable or undesirable...

    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

    It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.

    I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed.

    The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstances, whether created by others or by one's own human failing.

    The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.

    I am an invisible man. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids - and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.

    Commercial rock 'n' roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression.

    The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.


    Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.

    Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.

    I'm not a separatist. The imagination is integrative. That's how you make the new -- by putting something else with what you've got. And I'm unashamedly an American integrationist.

    If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to blind, imprison, and destroy.


    Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.

    By and large, the critics and readers gave me an affirmed sense of my identity as a writer. You might know this within yourself, but to have it affirmed by others is of utmost importance. Writing is, after all, a form of communication.

    The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas. Or, as Emerson insisted, the development of consciousness, consciousness, consciousness.

    The understanding of art depends finally upon one's willingness to extend one's humanity and one's knowledge of human life.

    There must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientists, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale.

    There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.

    Hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.

    Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.

    Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself out of those values.

    America is woven of many strands. I would recognise them and let it so remain. Our fate is to become one, and yet many. This is not prophecy, but description.


    More Ralph Ellison Quotations (Based on Topics)


    Man - Truth - Business & Commerce - Mind - Sense & Perception - America - World - Life - Art - Writing - Danger & Risk - Light - Science - Humanity - Progress - Actions - Fate & Destiny - Poets - Faces - View All Ralph Ellison Quotations

    More Ralph Ellison Quotations (By Book Titles)


    - Invisible Man

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