Ralph Ellison Quotes
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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.
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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.
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'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.'
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When I discover who I am, I'll be free.
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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.
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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 I will not only drop my defenses and my hostility, but I will sing your praises and help you to make the desert bear fruit.
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Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
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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.
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Hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
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The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
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If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to blind, imprison, and destroy.
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I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed.
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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
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Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
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Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
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The clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.
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I recall the sudden 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.
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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.
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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.
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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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The work of art is, after all, an act of faith in our ability to communicate symbolically.
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...to hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
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The understanding of art depends finally upon one's willingness to extend one's humanity and one's knowledge of human life.