Ralph Ellison Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• 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, Being Yourself, Men

  Ralph Ellison (2010). “Invisible Man”, p.40, Vintage

  17 Copy quote

• Light confirms my reality, gives birth to my form...without light I am not only invisible but formless as well; and to be unaware of one's form is to live a death...the truth is the light and light is the truth.

  Ralph Ellison

  Reality, Light, Giving

  40 Copy quote

• Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.

  Ralph Ellison

  Love, Beauty, Dream

  Ralph Ellison (2010). “Invisible Man”, p.44, Vintage

  18 Copy quote

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

  Ralph Ellison

  Gun, Cop, Poet

  Ralph Ellison (1994). “Invisible man”, Random House Inc

  32 Copy quote

• The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.

  Ralph Ellison

  Lying, Beginnings And Ends, Ends

  Ralph Ellison (2010). “Invisible Man”, p.31, Vintage

  17 Copy quote

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

  Ralph Ellison

  Writing, Past, Shadow

  Ralph Ellison (2011). “Shadow and Act”, p.19, Vintage

  11 Copy quote

• 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

  Ralph Ellison (2010). “Invisible Man”, p.592, Vintage

  25 Copy quote

• Whence all this passion toward conformity anyway? – diversity is the word. Let man keep his many parts and you'll 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 toward 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

  "Invisible Man".

  13 Copy quote

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

  Ralph Ellison

  Life, Moving, Arrows

  Ralph Ellison (2010). “Invisible Man”, p.31, Vintage

  30 Copy quote

• 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

  Ralph Ellison (2010). “Invisible Man”, p.590, Vintage

  11 Copy quote

• 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, Hated, Satisfied

  Ralph Ellison (2010). “Invisible Man”, p.585, Vintage

  9 Copy quote

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

  Ralph Ellison

  Morning, Museums, Looks

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  Ralph Ellison, Maryemma Graham, Amritjit Singh (1995). “Conversations with Ralph Ellison”, p.9, Univ. Press of Mississippi

  36 Copy quote

• 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

  Ralph Ellison (2010). “Invisible Man”, p.392, Vintage

  12 Copy quote

• 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

  Ralph Ellison (2011). “Shadow and Act”, p.245, Vintage

  25 Copy quote

• 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, Musician

  Ralph Ellison, Maryemma Graham, Amritjit Singh (1995). “Conversations with Ralph Ellison”, p.364, Univ. Press of Mississippi

  10 Copy quote

• Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.

  Ralph Ellison

  Mind, Shapes, Form

  Ralph Ellison (2010). “Three Days Before the Shooting . . .”, p.311, Modern Library

  8 Copy quote

• To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.

  Ralph Ellison

  Hell, Ashamed

  Ralph Ellison (2010). “Invisible Man”, p.276, Vintage

  13 Copy quote

• 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, Fairy Stories, Leaving

  National Book Award Acceptance Speech, www.nationalbook.org. 1953.

  19 Copy quote

• 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

  Ralph Ellison, Maryemma Graham, Amritjit Singh (1995). “Conversations with Ralph Ellison”, p.9, Univ. Press of Mississippi

  7 Copy quote

• The truth is the light and the light is the truth.

  Ralph Ellison

  Light, Truth Is

  4 Copy quote

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

  Ralph Ellison

  Art, Goya, Social

  Ralph Ellison, Maryemma Graham, Amritjit Singh (1995). “Conversations with Ralph Ellison”, p.8, Univ. Press of Mississippi

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Ralph Ellison (2011). “Juneteenth: A Novel”, p.92, Vintage

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  10 Copy quote

• I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.

  Ralph Ellison

  People, Black History, African American

  Invisible Man prologue (1952)

  21 Copy quote

Page 2 of 4

First

← Prev

1

2

3

4

Next →

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin