Ralph Ellison Quotes & Sayings

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

And yet I am what they think I am. — Ralph Ellison

They can laugh, but they can't deny us. They can curse and kill us, but they can't destroy us. This land is ours because we come out of it, we bled in it, our tears watered it, we fertilized it with our dead. So the more of us they destroy, the more it becomes filled with the spirit of our redemption. — Ralph Ellison

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

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

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

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

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

Let man keep his many parts and you'll have no tyrant states. — Ralph Ellison

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Civil wars...are the best wars for the writer...because they have a way of continuing long afterwl wars between nations are resolved; because, with the combatants being the same people, civil wars are never really won; and because their most devastating engagements are fought within the individual human heart. — Ralph Ellison

A start is a start, and 'is' is 'is' not 'was'. — Ralph Ellison

Once I saw a prizefighter boxing a yokel. The fighter was swift and
amazingly scientific. His body was one violent flow of rapid rhythmic action.
He hit the yokel a hundred times while the yokel held up his arms in
stunned surprise. But suddenly the yokel, rolling about in the gale of boxing
gloves, struck one blow and knocked science, speed and footwork as cold as a
Well-digger's posterior. The smart money hit the canvas. The long shot got the
nod. The yokel had simply stepped inside of his opponent's sense of time. — Ralph Ellison

He only wanted to use me for something. Everyone wanted to use you for some purpose. — Ralph Ellison

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

Tod Clifton's one with the ages. But what's that to do with you in this heat under this veiled sun? Now he's part of history, and he has received his true freedom. Didn't they scribble his name on a standardized pad? His Race: colored! Religion: unknown, probably born Baptist. Place of birth: U.S. Some southern town. Next of kin: unknown. Address: unknown. Occupation: unemployed. Cause of death (be specific): resisting reality in the form of a .38 caliber revolver in the hands of the arresting officer, on Forty-second between the library and the subway in the heat of the afternoon, of gunshot wounds received from three bullets, fired at three paces, one bullet entering the right ventricle of the heart, and lodging there, the other severing the spinal ganglia traveling downward to lodge in the pelvis, the other breaking through the back and traveling God knows where. — Ralph Ellison

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

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

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

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

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

It's you young folks what's going to make the changes, y'all's the ones. You got to lead and you got to fight and move us all on up a little higher. And I tell you something else, it's the ones from the South that's got to do it, them what knows the fire and ain't forgot how it burns. Up here too many forgits. They finds a place for themselves and forgits the ones on the bottom. Oh, heap of them talks about doing things, but they done really forgot. No, it's you young ones what has to remember and take the lead. — Ralph Ellison

Beware of those who speak of the spiral of history; they are preparing a boomerang. Keep a steel helmet handy — Ralph Ellison

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gin, jazz and dreams were not enough. — Ralph Ellison

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

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

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

They could laugh at him but they couldn't ignore him — Ralph Ellison

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

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

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

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

Do they come to bury the others or to be entombed to give life or to receive it? — Ralph Ellison

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

Ride 'em, cowboy. Give 'em hell and bananas. — Ralph Ellison

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

But we are all human, I thought, wondering what I meant. — Ralph Ellison

Dr. Gordon S. Seagrave, the famous "Burma Surgeon. — Ralph Ellison

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

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

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

So still and silent that they clash with the crowd in their very immobility; standing noisy in their silence; harsh as a cry of terror in their quietness. — Ralph Ellison

Though invisible I would be their assuring voice of denial; — Ralph Ellison

Tell them to teach them that when they call you nigger to make a rhyme with trigger it makes the gun backfire — Ralph Ellison

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

Can it be, I thought, can it actually be? ... could he be all of them: Rine the runner and Rine the gambler and Rine the briber and Rine the lover and Rinehart the Reverend? Could he himself be both rind and heart? ... Rinehart the rounder. It was true as I was true. His world was possibility and he knew it. He was years ahead of me and I was a fool. I must have been crazy and blind. The world in which we lived was without boundaries ... All boundaries down, freedom was not only the recognition of necessity, it was the recognition of possibility. And sitting there trembling I caught a brief glimpse of the possibilities posed by Rinehart's multiple personalities ... — Ralph Ellison

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

I ran away into the dark, laughing so hard I feared I might rupture myself. — Ralph Ellison

they could talk and agree with themselves, the world was nailed down, and they loved it. They received a feeling of security. — Ralph Ellison

Deep at the dark bottom of the melting pot, where the private is public and the public private, where black is white and white black, where the immoral becomes moral and the moral is anything that makes one feel good (or that one has the power to sustain), the white man's relish is apt to be the black man's gall. — Ralph Ellison

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

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

Then in my mind's eye I see the bronze statue of the college Founder, the cold Father symbol, his hands outstretched in the breathtaking gesture of lifting a veil that flutters in hard, metallic folds above the face of a kneeling slave; and I am standing puzzled, unable to decide whether the veil is really being lifted, or lowered more firmly in place; whether I am witnessing a revelation or a more efficient blinding. — Ralph Ellison

All it takes to get along in this here man's town is a little shit, grit, and mother-wit. — Ralph Ellison

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

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

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

Be your own father, young man — Ralph Ellison

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

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

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

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

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

These white folk have newspapers, magazines, radios, spokesmen to get their ideas across. If they want to tell the world a lie, they can tell it so well that it becomes the truth; and if I tell them that you're lying, they'll tell the world even if you prove you're telling the truth. Because it's the kind of lie they want to hear ... — Ralph Ellison

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

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

She was something more- a force, a stable, familiar force like something out of my past which kept me from whirling off into some unknown which I dared not face. It was a most painful position for at the same time Mary reminded me constantly that something was expected of me, some act of leadership, some newsworthy achievement; ... — Ralph Ellison

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

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

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

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

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

He's only a man. Remember that. He's only a man! — Ralph Ellison

An illusion was creating a counter-illusion. Where would it end? Did they believe their own propaganda? Afterwards — Ralph Ellison

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

You're very insistent, but I'm very busy. — Ralph Ellison

Come out of the fog, young man. And remember you don't have to be a complete fool in order to succeed. Play the game, but don't believe in it--that much you owe yourself. Even if it lands you in a strait jacket or a padded cell. 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--I wish I had time to tell you only a fragment. — Ralph Ellison

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