Ralph Ellison famous quotes

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

#Life #Inspiring #Reality

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

#Power #Self #Stopping

Education is all a matter of building bridges.
-- Ralph Ellison

#Education #High School Graduation #Bridges

When I discover who I am, I'll be free.
-- Ralph Ellison

#Inspirational #Life #Inspiring

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

#Real #Teaching #Desert

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

#Ornery #World #Wonderful

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

#Trying #Lost #Expected

There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
-- Ralph Ellison

#World #Dangerous

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

#Art #Shadow #Identity

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

#Commitment #Grows #Deeper

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

#Men #Minorities #Individual

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.
-- Ralph Ellison

#Music #Art #Men

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

#Fate #America #Woven

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

#Morning #Museums #Too Much

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.
-- Ralph Ellison

#Life #Glasses #Mirrors

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

#Reality #Leaving #Magic

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.
-- Ralph Ellison

#Country #Attitude #Hard Work

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

#Vision #Blindness

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

#Real #Fiction #Made

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

#Self Esteem #Expectations #Long

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

#Grandparent #African American #Slave

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

#Gun #Cop #Poet

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

#Sleep #World #Remember

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

#Art #Goya #Social

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

#Speak

The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
-- Ralph Ellison

#Lying #Ends

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

#Writing #Past #Shadow

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

#World #Possibility

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

#Unhappy #Territory #Needs

And I knew that it was better to live out one's absurdity than to die for that of others.
-- Ralph Ellison

#Absurdity

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

#People #Literature #Invisible

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

#Travel #Order #Giving

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

#Denial #Invisibility #Way

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

#Communication #Writing #Identity

America is woven of many strands; I would recognize them and let it so remain. It's 'winner take nothing' that is the great truth of our country or of any country. Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat. Our fate is to become one, and yet many - This in not prophecy, but description.
-- Ralph Ellison

#Life #Country #Fate

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.
-- Ralph Ellison

#Philosophy #Details #Alive

Man's hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.
-- Ralph Ellison

#Men #Purple #Eagles

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

#Imagination

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.
-- Ralph Ellison

#Music #Art #Failing

When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
-- Ralph Ellison

#Life Is #Theatrical

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.
-- Ralph Ellison

#Men #Hollywood #Invisible

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

#Crush #Art #Men

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

#Business #Confusing #Way

Many of the rites of passage, those rituals of growing up found in our society, are in the form of such comic, practical joking affairs--which we ignore in the belief that they possess no deeper significance. Yet it is precisely in their being regarded as unimportant that they take on importance. For in them we ritualize and dramatize attitudes which contradict and often embarrass the sacred values which we proclaim through our solemn ceremonies and rituals of nationhood.
-- Ralph Ellison

#Growing Up #Attitude #Our Society

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

#Solitude #Nerves #Unseen

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

#Giving #Patterns #Chaos

I suddenly recall the arpeggios of laughter lilting across the tender, springtime grass-gay-welling, far-floating, fluent, spontaneous, a bell-like feminine fluting, then suppressed; as though snuffed swiftly and irrevocably beneath the quiet solemnity of the vespered air now vibrant with somber chapel bells.
-- Ralph Ellison

#Laughter #Gay #Air

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

#Life #Moving #Arrows

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

#Relationship #Cousin #People

The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
-- Ralph Ellison

#Pride #Ideas #Irony

In order to travel far you have to be detached.
-- Ralph Ellison

#Order

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

#Action #Forget #Possibility

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

#Crafts #Serious #Conflict

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.
-- Ralph Ellison

#Giving #Attention #Too Much

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

#Lying #Humanity #Littles

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.
-- Ralph Ellison

#Dream #Real #Believe

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

#Grandfather #Trying #Sides

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

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

#Faces #Injustice #Harsh

Imitation is suicide, envy is ignorance.
-- Ralph Ellison

#Suicide #Ignorance #Envy

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.
-- Ralph Ellison

#Men #People #Mind

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

#Asking #Answers

To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
-- Ralph Ellison

#Hell #Ashamed

All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
-- Ralph Ellison

#Minorities #Individual #Certain

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

#Writing #Acceptance #Agony

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.
-- Ralph Ellison

#Men #Years #Trying

Commercial rock 'n' roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression.
-- Ralph Ellison

#Music #Rocks #Expression

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.
-- Ralph Ellison

#Work #Commitment #Circles

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

#Struggle #Reality #Mad

In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
-- Ralph Ellison

#Noise

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.
-- Ralph Ellison

#Passion #Men #Thinking

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

#Sacrifice #Merry Go Round #Wanted

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

#Sight #Mind #Patterns

My hole is warm and full of light.
-- Ralph Ellison

#Light #Holes

The clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.
-- Ralph Ellison

#Trying #Sirens #Empty

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

#Potency

Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
-- Ralph Ellison

#Preparation #Definitions #Hibernation

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

#Play #Style #Ears

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

#Boys #Keys #Rocks

I blundered into writing.
-- Ralph Ellison

#Writing

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!
-- Ralph Ellison

#Inspirational #Men #Self

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

#Honest #Being Honest #Hated

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

#Way #Problem

The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
-- Ralph Ellison

#Light #Truth Is

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

#Losing #Danger #Where You Are

We don't all dig Shakespeare uniformly, or even 'Little Red Riding Hood.' The understanding of art depends finally upon one's willingness to extend one's humanity and one's knowledge of human life.
-- Ralph Ellison

#Art #Understanding #Humanity

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

#Hurt #Pain #Invisibility

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

#Winter #Ice #Afternoon

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?
-- Ralph Ellison

#Dream #Writing #Ideas