Top 100 Quotes About Ralph Ellison
#1. Ralph Ellison is a classic work of erudition, grace, and elegance. Rampersad offers us an Ellison whose gifts and warts orbit the same universe of creative genius. Like Ellison's work, Rampersad's text wrestles eloquently with difficult truths about race, politics, and American life.
Michael Eric Dyson
#2. Perhaps we are able to see only that which we are prepared to see, and in our culture, the cost of insight is an uncertainty that threatens our already unstable sense of order and requires a constant questioning of accepted assumptions. Ralph Ellison (1995a, 31)
Black Hawk Hancock
#3. 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.
Ishmael Reed
#4. The project of Ralph Ellison's 'Invisible Man' is exactly that: to assert the beautiful, bountiful, chaotic complexity of one black American male. And, by extension, all black American males.
Victor LaValle
#5. One of the most widely read novels by a black American is Ralph Ellison's 'Invisible Man.' It is his masterwork - it won the National Book Award in 1953 and catapulted my man to the highest levels of literary esteem.
Victor LaValle
#6. Hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
Ralph Ellison
#7. Let man keep his many parts and you'll have no tyrant states.
Ralph Ellison
#8. I could hardly get to sleep for dreaming of revenge.
Ralph Ellison
#9. The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
Ralph Ellison
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
Ralph Ellison
#13. Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
Ralph Ellison
#14. 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
#15. Running from the birds to what, I didn't know. I ran. Why was I here at all? I ran through the night, ran within myself. Ran.
Ralph Ellison
#16. Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
Ralph Ellison
#17. 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
#18. I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed.
Ralph Ellison
#19. It was unbelievable, but perhaps only the unbelievable could be believed. Perhaps the truth was always a lie.
Ralph Ellison
#20. Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
Ralph Ellison
#21. During these times of indecision when all the old answers are proven false, the people look back to the dead to give them a clue, they call first upon one and then upon another of those who have acted in the past.
Ralph Ellison
#22. 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
#23. In order to travel far you have to be detached.
Ralph Ellison
#24. 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
#25. Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.
Ralph Ellison
#26. Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
Ralph Ellison
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.
Ralph Ellison
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. they could talk and agree with themselves, the world was nailed down, and they loved it. They received a feeling of security.
Ralph Ellison
#35. 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
#36. I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
Ralph Ellison
#37. The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
Ralph Ellison
#38. 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
#39. When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
Ralph Ellison
#40. It's the little things that find us out, the little things we refuse to do in order to avoid doing the big things that can save us.
Ralph Ellison
#41. He only wanted to use me for something. Everyone wanted to use you for some purpose.
Ralph Ellison
#42. 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
#43. Something in Mama's voice was vast and high, like a rainbow; yet something sad and deep, like when the organ played in church, was around Mama's words.
Ralph Ellison
#44. In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
Ralph Ellison
#45. All boundaries down, freedom was not only the recognition of necessity, it was the recognition of possibility.
Ralph Ellison
#46. All dreamers and sleepwalkers must pay the price, and even the invisible victim is responsible for the fate of all.
Ralph Ellison
#47. It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
Ralph Ellison
#48. 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
#49. The unheard sounds came through, and each melodic line existed of itself, stood out clearly from all the rest, said its piece, and waited patiently for the other voices to speak.
Ralph Ellison
#50. And sometimes the difference between individual and organized indignation is the difference between criminal and political action.
Ralph Ellison
#51. The work of art is, after all, an act of faith in our ability to communicate symbolically.
Ralph Ellison
#52. because what is commonly assumed to be past history is actually as much a part of the living present as William Faulkner insisted.
Ralph Ellison
#53. Dammit, white folk are always giving orders, it's a habit with them. Why didn't you make an excuse? You're black and living in the South
did you forget how to lie?
Ralph Ellison
#54. How could you treat a Negro as equal in war and then deny him equality during times of
Ralph Ellison
#55. Well, you had better speak more slowly so we can understand. We mean to do right by you, but you've got to know your place at all times. All right, now, go on with your speech.
Ralph Ellison
#56. The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
Ralph Ellison
#57. 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
#58. too much of your life will be lost, its meaning lost, unless you approach it as much through love as through hate.
Ralph Ellison
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. Words are your business, boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock, the answer to the question.
Ralph Ellison
#62. A start is a start, and 'is' is 'is' not 'was'.
Ralph Ellison
#63. Power, for the writer ... .lies in his ability to reveal if only a little bit more about the complexity of humanity.
Ralph Ellison
#64. But we are all human, I thought, wondering what I meant.
Ralph Ellison
#65. 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
#67. 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.
Ralph Ellison
#68. 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
#69. 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
#71. For their most innocent words were acts of violence to which we of the campus were hypersensitive though we endured them not.
Ralph Ellison
#72. 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.
Ralph Ellison
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to blind, imprison, and destroy.
Ralph Ellison
#76. But on the other hand, it would be a great mistake to assume that the dead are absolutely powerless.
Ralph Ellison
#77. 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.
Ralph Ellison
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. The world is a possibility if only you'll discover it.
Ralph Ellison
#82. I suspect that all the agony that goes into writing is borne precisely because the writer longs for acceptance-but it must be acceptance on his own terms.
Ralph Ellison
#83. The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
Ralph Ellison
#84. If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?
Ralph Ellison
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. 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.
Ralph Ellison
#91. And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone's way but my own.
Ralph Ellison
#93. 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
#94. 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.
Ralph Ellison
#95. Boo'ful," she said, "life could be so diff'rent - "
"But it never is," I said.
Ralph Ellison
#96. 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?
Ralph Ellison
#97. Man's hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.
Ralph Ellison
#98. I was to be a justifier, my task would be to deny the unpredictable human element of all Harlem so that they could ignore it when it in any way interfered with their plans.
Ralph Ellison
#99. 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
#100. Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled 'file and forget.'
Ralph Ellison
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