Welcome to our collection of quotes by Ralph Ellison. We hope you enjoy pondering them and please share widely.
Wikipedia Summary for Ralph Ellison
Ralph Waldo Ellison (March 1, 1913 – April 16, 1994) was an American novelist, literary critic, and scholar best known for his novel Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award in 1953. He also wrote Shadow and Act (1964), a collection of political, social, and critical essays, and Going to the Territory (1986). The New York Times dubbed him "among the gods of America's literary Parnassus." A posthumous novel, Juneteenth, was published after being assembled from voluminous notes he left upon his death.
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.
That... is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
Humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
For man without myth is Othello with Desdemona gone: chaos descends, faith vanishes and superstitions prowl in the mind.
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.
Longer Version:
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.
And I knew that it was better to live out one's absurdity than to die for that of others.
I've illuminated the blackness of my invisibility--and vice versa.
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.
Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled 'file and forget.'
Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
And sometimes the difference between individual and organized indignation is the difference between criminal and political action.
The world is a possibility if only you'll discover it.
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.
That ... is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
And all Negroes at some period of their lives there is that yearning for a sense of group unity that is the yearning of men for a flag: for a unity that cannot be compromised, that cannot be bought; that is conscious of itself, of its strength, that is militant.
When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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.
If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?
Call me Jack-the-Bear, for I am in a state of hibernation.
Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
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.
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.
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.
Commercial rock 'n' roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression.
The clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.
Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.
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.
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.
Times are grave and you seem very indignant.
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.
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?
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.
If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to bind, imprison and destroy.
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.
If only all the contradictory voices shouting in my head would calm down and sing a song in unison, whatever it was I wouldn't care as long as they sang without dissonance.
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?
America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
I was no longer afraid. Not of important men, not of trustees and such; for knowing now that there was nothing which I could expect from them, there was no reason to be afraid.
You're very insistent, but I'm very busy.
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.
It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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.
Man's hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.
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.
I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
Tell them to teach them that when they call you nigger to make a rhyme with trigger it makes the gun backfire.
New York! he said. That's not a place, it's a dream.
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.
There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.
Hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
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.
The understanding of art depends finally upon one's willingness to extend one's humanity and one's knowledge of human life.
The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed.
I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
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.
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.
The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
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.
If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to blind, imprison, and destroy.
Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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.
When I discover who I am, I'll be free.
Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.