Ralph Ellison > Quotes

“I ran away into the dark, laughing so hard I feared I might rupture myself.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“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, The Collected Essays

“But on the other hand, it would be a great mistake to assume that the dead are absolutely powerless.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Do they come to bury the others or to be entombed to give life or to receive it?”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Here are the facts. He was standing and he fell. He fell and he kneeled. He kneeled and he bled. He bled and he died. He tell in a heap like any man and his blood spilled out like any blood; red as any blood, wet as any blood and reflecting the sky and the buildings and birds and trees, or your face if you'd looked into its dulling mirror -- and it dried in the sun as blood dries. That's all. They spilled his blood and he bled. They cut him down and he died; the blood flowed on the walk in a pool, gleamed a while, and, after awhile, became dull then dusty, then dried.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are. That must be it, I thought—to lose your direction is to lose your face.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“They were very much the same, each attempting to force his picture of reality upon me and neither giving a hoot in hell for how things looked to me.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Those two spots are among the darkest of our whole civilization--pardon me, our whole culture (an important distinction, I've heard)--which might sound like a hoax, or a contradiction, but that (by contradiction, I mean) is how the world moves: not like an arrow, but a boomerang. (Beware of those who speak of the spiral of history; they are preparing a boomerang. Keep a steel helmet handy.)”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Beware of those who speak of the spiral of history; they are preparing a boomerang. Keep a steel helmet handy”
― Ralph Ellison Invisible Man

“All boundaries down, freedom was not only the recognition of necessity, it was the recognition of possibility.”
― Ralph Ellison

“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 … But”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“For their most innocent words were acts of violence to which we of the campus were hypersensitive though we endured them not.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“I had no doubt that I could do something, but what, and how? I had no contacts and I believed in nothing. And the obsession with my identity which I had developed in the factory hospital returned with a vengeance. Who was I, how had I come to be?”
― Ralph Ellison

“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.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“No indeed, the world is just as concrete, ornery, vile and sublimely wonderful as before, only now I better understand my relation to it and it to me.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“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.”
― Ralph Ellison

“Don’t come early in the morning Neither in the heat of the day But come in the sweet cool of the Evening and wash my sins away”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Now you're free of illusions,' Jack said, pointing to my seed wasting upon the air. 'How does it feel to be free of one's illusions?'

And now I answered, 'Painful and empty... But look... there's your universe, and that drip-drop upon the water you hear is all the history you've made, all you're going to make”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Responsibility rests upon recognition, and recognition is a form of agreement.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Even the church has to have its outhouse, just as it has to have a front door as well as a back door, a basement as well as a steeple. Because man is always going to be man....”
― Ralph Ellison, Juneteenth

“So now they're shaking in their boots and looking for someone to give them the answer they want to hear. Not the truth, but some lie that will protect them from the truth”
― Ralph Ellision

“Boy on a Train From”
― Ralph Ellison, Flying Home and Other Stories

“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.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“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. I am not complaining, nor am I protesting either. It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Poor stumblers, neither of you can see the other. To you he is a mark on the scorecard 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, Invisible Man

“Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled “file and forget,” and I can neither file nor forget.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“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, Invisible Man

“Agree ’em to death and destruction,” grandfather had advised.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.”
― Ralph Ellison in Juneteenth

“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