Ralph Ellison Quotes

69 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

Ralph Ellison
And I knew that it was better to live out one's absurdity than to die for that of others.

Ralph Ellison
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.

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

Ralph Ellison
We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.

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

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

Ralph Ellison
I never told you, but our life is a war and I have been a traitor all my born days, a spy in the enemy's country ever since I give up my gun back in the Reconstruction. Live with your head in the lion's mouth. I want you to overcome 'em with yeses, undermine 'em with grins, agree 'em to death and destruction, let 'em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open...

Ralph Ellison
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 failings.

Ralph Ellison
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.

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

Ralph Ellison
It's when you feel like this that, out of resentment, you begin to bump people back. And, let me confess, you feel that way most of the time. You ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world, that you're a part of all the sound and anguish, and you strike out with your fists, you curse and you swear to make them recognize you. And, alas, it's seldom successful.

Ralph Ellison
I am a novelist, not an activist... But I think that no one who reads what I write or who listens to my lectures can doubt that I am enlisted in the freedom movement. As an individual, I am primarily responsible for the health of American literature and culture. When I write, I am trying to make sense out of chaos. To think that a writer must think about his Negroness is to fall into a trap.

Ralph Ellison
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.

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

Ralph Ellison
I recognize no dichotomy between art and protest.

Ralph Ellison