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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Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
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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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Hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
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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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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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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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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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Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
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The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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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.
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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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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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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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Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
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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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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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...to hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
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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.