Ralph Ellison Quotes

It goes a long way back, some twenty years. All my life I had been looking for something, and everyw...

All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what ...

Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to ha...

What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself h...

You're a Black educated fool, son. These white folk have newspapers, magazines, radios, spokesmen to...

So why do I write, torturing myself to put it down? Because in spite of myself I've learned some thi...

I'd been so fascinated by the notion, that I'd forgotten to measure what it was bringing forth. I'd ...

I denounce because though implicated and partially responsible, I have been hurt to the point of aby...

I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of ...

I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest. Or when, even as just now I've tried to artic...

Perhaps everyone loved someone; I didn't now, I couldn't give much thought to love; in order to trav...

Maybe it's just that some of us have had certain facts and truths slapped up against our heads so ha...

Literature is integrated, and I'm not just talking about color or race. I'm talking about the power ...

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

And all Negroes at some period of their lives there is that yearning for a sense of group unity that...

By and large, the critics and readers gave me an affirmed sense of my identity as a writer. You migh...

Education is all a matter of building bridges.

So now they're shaking in their boots and looking for someone to give them the answer they want to h...

Can it be, I thought, can it actually be? .......could he be all of them: Rine the runner and Rine t...

The understanding of art depends finally upon one's willingness to extend one's humanity and one's k...

a delegate shout out from the floor: “Peonage, Anti-Lynch Bill, poll tax, these are our issues. They...

Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a c...

When we finally achieve the full right of participation in American life, what we make of it will de...

...out of the counterfeiting of the black American's identity [in blackface minstrelsy] there arises...

When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.

Deep at the dark bottom of the melting pot, where the private is public and the public private, wher...

But what a feeling can come over a man just from seeing the things he believes in and hopes for symb...

God is love, I said, but art's the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.

I was no longer afraid. Not of important men, not of trustees and such; for knowing now that there w...

I am standing puzzled, unable to decide whether the veil is really being lifted, or lowered more fir...

I could hardly get to sleep for dreaming of revenge.

The moment I entered the bright, buzzing lobby of Men’s House I was overcome by a sense of alienatio...

...she was something more- a force, a stable, familiar force like something out of my past which kep...

And while the ice was melting to form a flood in which I threatened to drown I awoke one afternoon t...

I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids- and I might even be said to possess a...

Everywhere I've turned somebody has wanted to sacrifice me for my own good—only /they/ were the ones...

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

When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.

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

The work of art is, after all, an act of faith in our ability to communicate symbolically.

New York!" he said. "That's not a place, it's a dream.

I had no doubt that I could do something, but what, and how? I had no contacts and I believed in not...

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

The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.