Ralph Ellison Quotes

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.

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.

And I knew that it was better to live out one's absurdity than to die for that of others.

I feel the need to reaffirm all of it, the whole unhappy territory and all the things loved and unloveable in it, for it is all part of me.

And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone's way but my own.

My hole is warm and full of light.

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.

It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.

Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled 'file and forget.'

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.

The clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.

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

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.

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

Commercial rock 'n' roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression.

All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.

...and yet I am what they think I am.

I blundered into writing.

Having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge.

In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.

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.

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

I could hardly get to sleep for dreaming of revenge.

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

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

Maybe it's just that some of us have had certain facts and truths slapped up against our heads so hard and so often that we have to see them and pay our respects to their reality.

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

So now they're shaking in their boots and looking for someone to give them the answer they want to hear. Not the truth, but some lie that will protect them from the truth

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

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

Literature is integrated, and I'm not just talking about color or race. I'm talking about the power of literature to make us recognize - and again and again - the wholeness of the human experience.

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