Top 100 Ralph Ellison Quotes
#1. Hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
Ralph Ellison
#2. Let man keep his many parts and you'll have no tyrant states.
Ralph Ellison
#3. I could hardly get to sleep for dreaming of revenge.
Ralph Ellison
#4. 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.
Ralph Ellison
#5. 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.
Ralph Ellison
#6. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
Ralph Ellison
#7. 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.
Ralph Ellison
#8. It was unbelievable, but perhaps only the unbelievable could be believed. Perhaps the truth was always a lie.
Ralph Ellison
#9. Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
Ralph Ellison
#10. 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
#11. In order to travel far you have to be detached.
Ralph Ellison
#12. And let's remember that science isn't a game of chess, although chess may be played scientifically. The other thing to remember is that if we are to organize the masses we must first organize ourselves.
Ralph Ellison
#13. Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
Ralph Ellison
#14. Which suggested to me that a novel could be fashioned as a raft of hope, perception and entertainment that might help keep us afloat as we tried to negotiate the snags and whirlpools that mark our nation's vacillating course toward and away from the democratic ideal.
Ralph Ellison
#15. As the advertising industry, which is dedicated to the creation of masks, makes clear, that which cannot gain authority from tradition may borrow it with a mask.
Ralph Ellison
#16. 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
#17. Our task, then always, is to challenge the apparent forms of reality-that is, the fixed manner and values of the few, and to struggle with it until it reveals its mad, vari-implicated chaos, its false face, and so on until it surrenders its insight, its truth.
Ralph Ellison
#18. they could talk and agree with themselves, the world was nailed down, and they loved it. They received a feeling of security.
Ralph Ellison
#20. And in order for the Negro to fulfill his duty as a citizen it was often necessary that he fight for his self-affirmed right to fight.
Ralph Ellison
#21. I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
Ralph Ellison
#22. The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
Ralph Ellison
#23. 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.
Ralph Ellison
#24. When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
Ralph Ellison
#25. He only wanted to use me for something. Everyone wanted to use you for some purpose.
Ralph Ellison
#26. 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.
Ralph Ellison
#27. In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
Ralph Ellison
#28. Perhaps simple to be known, to be looked upon by so many people, to be the focal point of so many concentrating eyes, perhaps this was enough to make one different; enough to transform one into something else, someone else; just as by becoming and increasingly larger boy one became one day a man.
Ralph Ellison
#29. The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
Ralph Ellison
#30. His name was Clifton and he was black and they shot him. Isn't that enough to tell? Isn't it all you need to know?
Ralph Ellison
#31. too much of your life will be lost, its meaning lost, unless you approach it as much through love as through hate.
Ralph Ellison
#32. while fiction is but a form of symbolic action, a mere game of "as if," therein lies its true function and its potential for effecting change.
Ralph Ellison
#33. 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.
Ralph Ellison
#34. A start is a start, and 'is' is 'is' not 'was'.
Ralph Ellison
#35. Power, for the writer ... .lies in his ability to reveal if only a little bit more about the complexity of humanity.
Ralph Ellison
#36. But we are all human, I thought, wondering what I meant.
Ralph Ellison
#37. All they wanted of me was one belch of affirmation and I'd bellow it out loud. Yes! Yes! YES! That was all anyone wanted of us, that we should be heard and not seen, and then heard only in one big optimistic chorus of yassuh, yassuh, yassuh!
Ralph Ellison
#39. 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.
Ralph Ellison
#40. 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.
Ralph Ellison
#41. For their most innocent words were acts of violence to which we of the campus were hypersensitive though we endured them not.
Ralph Ellison
#42. 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
#43. 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.
Ralph Ellison
#44. If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to blind, imprison, and destroy.
Ralph Ellison
#45. 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.
Ralph Ellison
#47. The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
Ralph Ellison
#49. 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
#50. Nothing ever stops; it divides and multiplies, and I guess sometimes it gets ground down superfine, but it doesn't just blow away.
Ralph Ellison
#52. And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone's way but my own.
Ralph Ellison
#54. 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-
Ralph Ellison
#55. Boo'ful," she said, "life could be so diff'rent - "
"But it never is," I said.
Ralph Ellison
#56. Man's hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.
Ralph Ellison
#57. 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
#58. Tell them to teach them that when they call you nigger to make a rhyme with trigger it makes the gun backfire
Ralph Ellison
#59. Beware of those who speak of the spiral of history; they are preparing a boomerang. Keep a steel helmet handy
Ralph Ellison
#60. 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
#62. They could laugh at him but they couldn't ignore him
Ralph Ellison
#63. 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.
Ralph Ellison
#64. collectivity of politically astute citizens who, by virtue of our vaunted system of universal education and our freedom of opportunity, would be prepared to govern.
Ralph Ellison
#65. An illusion was creating a counter-illusion. Where would it end? Did they believe their own propaganda? Afterwards
Ralph Ellison
#68. Education is all a matter of building bridges.
Ralph Ellison
#69. The clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.
Ralph Ellison
#70. 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
#71. Though invisible I would be their assuring voice of denial;
Ralph Ellison
#72. 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.
Ralph Ellison
#73. 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?
Ralph Ellison
#74. Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
Ralph Ellison
#75. 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.
Ralph Ellison
#76. Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
Ralph Ellison
#77. 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
#78. prepared to make the ultimate wartime sacrifice that most governments demand of their able-bodied citizens, but his was one that regarded his life as of lesser value than the lives of whites making the same sacrifice.
Ralph Ellison
#79. I'd been so fascinated by the notion, that I'd forgotten to measure what it was bringing forth. I'd been asleep, dreaming.
Ralph Ellison
#80. For now I had begun to believe, despite all the talk of science around me, that there was a magic in spoken words.
Ralph Ellison
#81. 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
#82. Having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge.
Ralph Ellison
#83. 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 Ellison
#84. But not quite, for actually it is only the known, the seen, the heard and only those events that the recorder regards as important that are put down, those lies his keepers keep their power by.
Ralph Ellison
#85. All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was.
Ralph Ellison
#86. Dr. Gordon S. Seagrave, the famous "Burma Surgeon.
Ralph Ellison
#87. 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
#88. He's only a man. Remember that. He's only a man!
Ralph Ellison
#89. The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
Ralph Ellison
#90. 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!
Ralph Ellison
#91. We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
Ralph Ellison
#92. God is love, I said, but art's the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.
Ralph Ellison
#93. I ran away into the dark, laughing so hard I feared I might rupture myself.
Ralph Ellison
#94. 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
#95. Some things are just too unjust for words, and too ambiguous for either speech or ideas.
Ralph Ellison
#96. 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
#97. And I knew that it was better to live out one's absurdity than to die for that of others.
Ralph Ellison
#98. Call me Jack-the-Bear, for I am in a state of hibernation.
Ralph Ellison
#99. The understanding of art depends finally upon one's willingness to extend one's humanity and one's knowledge of human life.
Ralph Ellison
#100. 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.
Ralph Ellison
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