Ralph Ellison Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Ralph Ellison. Here they are! All 100 of them:

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When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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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?
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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The world is a possibility if only you'll discover it.
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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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
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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I am an invisible man. No I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allen 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, simply because people refuse to see me.
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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Power doesn't have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it.
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. 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.
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone's way but my own.
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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I remember that I'm invisible and walk softly so as not awake the sleeping ones. Sometimes it is best not to awaken them; there are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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And I knew that it was better to live out one's absurdity than to die for that of others.
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Ralph Ellison
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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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Play the game, but don’t believe in it – that much you owe yourself … Play the game, but raise the ante, my boy. Learn how it operates, learn how you operate.
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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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.
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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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.
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
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Ralph Ellison
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Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
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Ralph Ellison
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We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
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Ralph Ellison (Shadow and Act)
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Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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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.
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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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.
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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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 was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naive. 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. But first I had to discover that I am an invisible man!
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Ralph Ellison
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America is woven of many strands. I would recognise them and let it so remain. Our fate is to become one, and yet many.
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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Words are your business, boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock, the answer to the question.
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Ralph Ellison
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Some things are just too unjust for words, and too ambiguous for either speech or ideas.
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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Everywhere I've turned somebody has wanted to sacrifice me for my own goodβ€”only /they/ were the ones who benefited. And now we start on the old sacrificial merry-go-round. At what point do we stop?
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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They could laugh at him but they couldn't ignore him
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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I knew that it was better to live out one’s own absurdity than to die for that of others.
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Ralph Ellison
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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. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.
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Ralph Ellison (Living with Music: Jazz Writings)
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I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed.
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Ralph Ellison
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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.
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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Man's hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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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?
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Ralph Ellison
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And sometimes the difference between individual and organized indignation is the difference between criminal and political action.
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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I denounce because though implicated and partially responsible, I have been hurt to the point of abysmal pain, hurt to the point of invisibility. And I defend because in spite of it all, I find that I love.
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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For, like almost everyone else in our country, I started out with my share of optimism. I believed in hard work and progress and action, but now, after first being 'for' society and then 'against' it, I assign myself no rank or any limit, and such an attitude is very much against the trend of the times. But my world has become one of infinite possibilities. What a phrase - still it's a good phrase and a good view of life, and a man shouldn't accept any other; that much I've learned underground. Until some gang succeeds in putting the world in a strait jacket, its definition is possibility.
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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All it takes to get along in this here man's town is a little shit, grit, and mother-wit.
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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Whence all this passion towards conformity anyway? Diversity is the word. Let man keep his many parts and you will have no tyrant states. Why, if they follow this conformity business, they'll end up by forcing me, an invisible man, to become white, which is not a color but the lack of one. Must I strive towards colorlessness? But seriously and without snobbery, think of what the world would lose if that should happen. America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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As Ralph Ellison once posited, we’re invisible to them. We’re simply not on their radar. As long as the people who are in charge aren’t us, things will never change.
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Issa Rae (The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl)
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But we are all human, I thought, wondering what I meant.
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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If only all the contradictory voices shouting inside my head would calm down and sing a song in unison, whatever it was I wouldn't care as long as they sang without dissonance.
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
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Ralph Ellison (Living with Music: Jazz Writings)
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The clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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God is love, I said, but art's the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.
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Ralph Ellison (Juneteenth)
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Words of Emancipation didn't arrive until the middle of June so they called it Juneteenth. So that was it, the night of Juneteenth celebration, his mind went on. The celebration of a gaudy illusion.
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Ralph Ellison (Juneteenth)
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It was unbelievable, but perhaps only the unbelievable could be believed. Perhaps the truth was always a lie.
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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Dualism::In Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man I am outside of history. i wish i had some peanuts, it looks hungry there in the cage. i am outside of history. its hungrier than i thot.
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Ishmael Reed (New and Collected Poems, 1964-2006)
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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. 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.
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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Ralph Ellison
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I could hardly get to sleep for dreaming of revenge.
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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You're very insistent, but I'm very busy.
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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Live with your head in the lion’s mouth.
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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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.
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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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.
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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Nothing ever stops; it divides and multiplies, and I guess sometimes it gets ground down superfine, but it doesn't just blow away.
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Ralph Ellison (Juneteenth)
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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 imaginationβ€”indeed, everything and anything except me.
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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All dreamers and sleepwalkers must pay the price, and even the invisible victim is responsible for the fate of all.
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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And I love light. Perhaps you'll think it strange that an invisible man should need light, desire light, love light. But maybe it is exactly because I am invisible. Light confirms my reality, gives birth to my form.
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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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.
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Ralph Ellison
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They can laugh, but they can't deny us. They can curse and kill us, but they can't destroy us. This land is ours because we come out of it, we bled in it, our tears watered it, we fertilized it with our dead. So the more of us they destroy, the more it becomes filled with the spirit of our redemption.
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Ralph Ellison
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But that's getting too far ahead of the story, almost to the end, although the end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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i am invisible understand, simply because people refuse to see me
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Ralph Ellison
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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.
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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I'd been so fascinated by the notion, that I'd forgotten to measure what it was bringing forth. I'd been asleep, dreaming.
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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I am standing puzzled, unable to decide whether the veil is really being lifted, or lowered more firmly in place; whether I am witnessing a revelation or a more efficient blinding.
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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Yes, they think we're dumb. They call us the "common people." But I've been sitting here listening and looking and trying to understand what's so common about us. I think they're guilty of a gross mis-statement of fact-we are the uncommon people-
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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Boo'ful," she said, "life could be so diff'rentβ€”" "But it never is," I said.
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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Maybe it's just that some of us have had certain facts and truths slapped up against our heads so hard and so often that we have to see them and pay our respects to their reality.
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Ralph Ellison
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My hole is warm and full of light.
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Ralph Ellison
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I was no longer afraid. Not of important men, not of trustees and such; for knowing now that there was nothing which I could expect from them, there was no reason to be afraid.
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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For now I had begun to believe, despite all the talk of science around me, that there was a magic in spoken words.
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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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...
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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Who am I? But it was like trying to identify one particular cell that coursed through the torpid veins of my body. Maybe I was just this blackness and bewilderment and pain, but that seemed less like a suitable answer than something I'd read somewhere.
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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To see around corners is enough (that is not unusual when you are invisible). But to hear around them is too much; it inhibits action.
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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The understanding of art depends finally upon one's willingness to extend one's humanity.
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Ralph Ellison
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You start Saul, and end up Paul,' my grandfather had often said. 'When you're a youngun, you Saul, but let life whup your head a bit and you starts to trying to be Paul – though you still Sauls around on the side.
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Ralph Ellison
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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.
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Ralph Ellison (Juneteenth)
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But live you must, and you can either make passive love to your sickness or burn it out and go on to the next conflicting phase.
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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You're a Black educated fool, son. These white folk have newspapers, magazines, radios, spokesmen to get their ideas across. If they want to tell the world a lie, they can tell it so well that it becomes the truth; and if I tell them you're lying, they'll tell the world even if you prove you're telling the truth. Because it's the kind of lie they want to hear.
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Ralph Ellison
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Not only could you travel upward toward success but you could travel downward as well; up and down, in retreat as well as in advance, crabways and crossways and around in a circle, meeting your old selves coming and going and perhaps all at the same time.
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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What if history was a gambler, instead of a force in a laboratory experiment, and the boys his ace in the hole? What if history was not a reasonable citizen, but a madman full of paranoid guile and these boys his agents, his big surprise! His own revenge?
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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I'd like to hear five recordings of Louis Armstrong playing and singing "What Did I Do to Be so Black and Blue"-all at the same time. Sometimes now I listen to Louis while I have my favorite dessert of vanilla ice cream and sloe gin. I pour the red liquid over the white mound, watching it glisten and the vapor rising as Louis bends that military instrument into a beam of lyrical sound.
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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Literature is integrated, and I'm not just talking about color or race. I'm talking about the power of literature to make us recognize - and again and again - the wholeness of the human experience.
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Ralph Ellison
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These white folk have newspapers, magazines, radios, spokesmen to get their ideas across. If they want to tell the world a lie, they can tell it so well that it becomes the truth; and if I tell them that you’re lying, they’ll tell the world even if you prove you’re telling the truth. Because it’s the kind of lie they want to hear …
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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That invisibility to which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come in contact. A matter of the construction of their INNER eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality.
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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We create the race by creating ourselves and then to our great astonishment we will have created something far more important: We will have created a culture. Why waste time creating a conscience for something that doesn't exist? For, you see, blood and skin do not think!
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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At best Americans give but a limited attention to history. Too much happens too rapidly, and before we can evaluate it, or exhaust its meaning or pleasure, there is something new to concern us. Ours is the tempo of the motion picture, not that of the still camera, and we waste experience as we wasted the forest.
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Ralph Ellison (Shadow and Act)
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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 -- not even I. On the other hand, I've never been more loved and appreciated than when I tried to "justify" and affirm someone's mistaken beliefs; or when I've tried to give my friends the incorrect, absurd answers they wished to hear. In my presence they could talk and agree with themselves, the world was nailed down, and they loved it. They received a feeling of security. But here was the rub: Too often, in order to justify them, I had to take myself by the throat and choke myself until my eyes bulged and my tongue hung out and wagged like the door of an empty house in a high wind. Oh, yes, it made them happy and it made me sick. So I became ill of affirmation, of saying "yes" against the nay-saying of my stomach -- not to mention my brain.
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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And I defend because in spite of all I find that I love. In order to get some of it down I have to love. I sell you no phony forgiveness, I'm a desperate man – but too much of your life will be lost, its meaning lost, unless you approach it as much through love as through hate. So I approach it through division so I denounce and I defend and I hate and I love.
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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Come out of the fog, young man. And remember you don't have to be a complete fool in order to succeed. Play the game, but don't believe in it--that much you owe yourself. Even if it lands you in a strait jacket or a padded cell. Play the game, but play it your own way--part of the time at least. Play the game, but raise the ante, my boy. Learn how it operates, learn how you operate--I wish I had time to tell you only a fragment.
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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Once I saw a prizefighter boxing a yokel. The fighter was swift and amazingly scientific. His body was one violent flow of rapid rhythmic action. He hit the yokel a hundred times while the yokel held up his arms in stunned surprise. But suddenly the yokel, rolling about in the gale of boxing gloves, struck one blow and knocked science, speed and footwork as cold as a Well-digger's posterior. The smart money hit the canvas. The long shot got the nod. The yokel had simply stepped inside of his opponent's sense of time.
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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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? What a waste, what a senseless waste! But what of those things which you actually didn't like, not because you were not supposed to like them, not because to dislike them was considered a mark of refinement and education - but because you actually found them distasteful? The very idea annoyed me. How could you know? It involved a problem of choice. I would have to weigh many things carefully before deciding and there would be some things that would cause quite a bit of trouble, simply because I had never formed a personal attitude toward so much. I had accepted the accepted attitudes and it had made life seem simple ...
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Ralph Ellison
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I can hear you say, "What a horrible, irresponsible bastard!" And you're right. I leap to agree with you. 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? And wait until I reveal how truly irresponsible I am. Responsibility rests upon recognition, and recognition is a form of agreement.
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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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? What a waste, what a senseless waste! But what of those things which you actually didn't like, not because you were not supposed to like them, not because to dislike them was considered a mark of refinement and education -- but because you actually found them distasteful? The very idea annoyed me. How could you know? It involved a problem of choice. I would have to weigh many things carefully before deciding and there would be some things that would cause quite a bit of trouble, simply because I had never formed a personal attitude toward so much. I had accepted the accepted attitudes and it had made life seem simple . . .
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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They were blind, bat blind, moving only by the echoed sounds of their own voices. And because they were blind they would destroy themselves and I'd help them. I laughed. Here I had thought they accepted me because they felt that color made no difference, when in reality it made no difference because they didn't see either color or men . . . For all they were concerned, we were so many names scribbled on fake ballots, to be used at their convenience and when not needed to be filed away. It was a joke, an absurd joke.
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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When we finally achieve the full right of participation in American life, what we make of it will depend upon our sense of cultural values, and our creative use of freedom, not upon our racial identification. I see no reason why the heritage of world cultureβ€”which represents a continuumβ€”should be confused with the notion of race. Japan erected a highly efficient modern technology upon a religious culture which viewed the Emperor as a god. The Germany which produced Beethoven and Hegel and Mann turned its science and technology to the monstrous task of genocide; one hopes that when what are known as the β€œNegro” societies are in full possession of the world’s knowledge and in control of their destinies, they will bring to an end all those savageries which for centuries have been committed in the name of race. From what we are now witnessing in certain parts of the world today, however, there is no guarantee that simply being non-white offers any guarantee of this. The demands of state policy are apt to be more influential than morality. I would like to see a qualified Negro as President of the United States. But I suspect that even if this were today possible, the necessities of the office would shape his actions far more than his racial identity.
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Ralph Ellison (Shadow and Act)