Top 98 Quotes & Sayings by 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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Education is all a matter of building bridges.

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

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

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

I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.

Hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.

When I discover who I am, I'll be free.

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

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

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.

The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.

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

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

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.

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

That ... is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.

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!

It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.

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.

And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone's way but my own.

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

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?

Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.

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.

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

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.

I am nobody but myself.

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

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?

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.

I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.

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.

Whence all this passion toward conformity anyway? – diversity is the word. Let man keep his many parts and you'll 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 toward 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.

Light confirms my reality, gives birth to my form...without light I am not only invisible but formless as well; and to be unaware of one's form is to live a death...the truth is the light and light is the truth.

I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.

The truth is the light and the light is the truth.

In order to travel far you have to be detached.

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

God is love, I said, but art's the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.

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

Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.

Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?

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.

If you can show me how I can cling to that which is real to me, while teaching me a way into the larger society, then and only then will I drop my defenses and hostility, and I will sing your praises and help you to make the desert bear fruit.

The world is a possibility if only you'll discover it.

Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled 'file and forget.'

All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority. The universal in the novel-and isn't that what we're all clamoring for these days?-is reached only through the depiction of the specific man in a specific circumstance.

Without involvement, there is no commitment. Mark it down, asterisk it, circle it, underline it." Stephen Covey "It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.

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.

The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstance whether created by others or by one's own human failings. They are the only consistent art in the United States which constantly remind us of our limitations while encouraging us to see how far we can actually go. When understood in their more profound implication, they are a corrective, an attempt to draw a line upon man's own limitless assertion.

To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.

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

Power, for the writer....lies in his ability to reveal if only a little bit more about the complexity of humanity.

Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.