Ralph Ellison Quotes

69 Sourced Quotes

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

Ralph Ellison
I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. 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.

Ralph Ellison
Words are your business, boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock, the answer to the question.

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

Ralph Ellison
Beware of those who speak of the spiral of history; they are preparing a boomerang.

Ralph Ellison
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.

Ralph Ellison
The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.

Ralph Ellison
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.

Ralph Ellison
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 that makes unseen things manifest and allows him to come to his hopes and dreams through his outer eye and through the touch and feel of his natural hand.

Ralph Ellison
I know of no valid demonstration that culture is transmitted through the genes.

Ralph Ellison
That which we remember is, more often than not, that which we would like to have been; or that which we hope to be. Thus our memory and our identity are ever at odds; our history ever a tale told by inattentive idealists.

Ralph Ellison
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
"Now black is..." the preacher shouted.
"Bloody..."
"I said black is..."
"Preachit, brother..."
"... an' black ain't..."

Ralph Ellison
Life is as the sea, art a ship in which man conquers life's crushing formlessness, reducing it to a course, a series of swells, tides and wind currents inscribed on a chart.

Ralph Ellison
Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty.

Ralph Ellison
I recognize no dichotomy between art and protest.

Ralph Ellison
The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.

Ralph Ellison
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.

Ralph Ellison
The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism.

Ralph Ellison
I am one of the most irresponsible beings that ever lived. Irresponsibility is part of my invisibility; any way you face it, it is a denial. But to whom can I be responsible, and why should I be, when you refuse to see me?

Ralph Ellison
Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.

Ralph Ellison
As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.

Ralph Ellison
Everywhere I've turned somebody has wanted to sacrifice me for my own good—only /they/ were the ones who benefited. And now we start on the old sacrificial merry-go-round. At what point do we stop?

Ralph Ellison
So why do I write, torturing myself to put it down? Because in spite of myself I've learned some things. Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled "file and forget," and I can neither file nor forget. Nor will certain ideas forget me; they keep filing away at my lethargy, my complacency. Why should I be the one to dream this nightmare?

Ralph Ellison
If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?

Ralph Ellison
In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.

Ralph Ellison
... you both fail to understand what is happening to you. You cannot see or hear or smell the truth of what you see — and you, looking for destiny! It's classic! And the boy, this automaton, he was made of the very mud of the region and sees far less than you. Poor stumblers, neither of you can see the other. To you he is a mark on the score-card of your achievement, a thing and not a man; a child, or even less — a black, amorphous thing. And you, for all your power, are not a man to him, but a God, a force...

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

Ralph Ellison
While one can do nothing about choosing one's relatives one can, as artist, choose one's "ancestors."

Ralph Ellison
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.

Ralph Ellison