Ralph Ellison > Quotes

“Everywhere I've turned somebody has wanted to sacrifice me for my own good—only /they/ were the ones who benefited. And now we start on the old sacrificial merry-go-round. At what point do we stop?”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Words are your business, boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock, the answer to the question.”
― Ralph Ellison

“Some things are just too unjust for words, and too ambiguous for either speech or ideas.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“I knew that it was better to live out one’s own absurdity than to die for that of others.”
― Ralph Ellison

“They could laugh at him but they couldn't ignore him”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“The truth is the light and the light is the truth.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“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.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“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.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed.”
― Ralph Ellison.

“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 -- not even I. On the other hand, I've never been more loved and appreciated than when I tried to "justify" and affirm someone's mistaken beliefs; or when I've tried to give my friends the incorrect, absurd answers they wished to hear. In my presence they could talk and agree with themselves, the world was nailed down, and they loved it. They received a feeling of security. But here was the rub: Too often, in order to justify them, I had to take myself by the throat and choke myself until my eyes bulged and my tongue hung out and wagged like the door of an empty house in a high wind. Oh, yes, it made them happy and it made me sick. So I became ill of affirmation, of saying "yes" against the nay-saying of my stomach -- not to mention my brain.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“And sometimes the difference between individual and organized indignation is the difference between criminal and political action.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“All it takes to get along in this here man's town is a little shit, grit, and mother-wit.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Man's hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“But we are all human, I thought, wondering what I meant.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“If only all the contradictory voices shouting inside 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.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.”
― Ralph Ellison, Living with Music: Jazz Writings

“The clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Words of Emancipation didn't arrive until the middle of June so they called it Juneteenth. So that was it, the night of Juneteenth celebration, his mind went on. The celebration of a gaudy illusion.”
― Ralph Ellison, Juneteenth

“God is love, I said, but art's the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.”
― Ralph Ellison, Juneteenth

“They can laugh, but they can't deny us. They can curse and kill us, but they can't destroy us. This land is ours because we come out of it, we bled in it, our tears watered it, we fertilized it with our dead. So the more of us they destroy, the more it becomes filled with the spirit of our redemption.”
― Ralph Ellison

“I could hardly get to sleep for dreaming of revenge.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do? What a waste, what a senseless waste! But what of those things which you actually didn't like, not because you were not supposed to like them, not because to dislike them was considered a mark of refinement and education - but because you actually found them distasteful? The very idea annoyed me. How could you know? It involved a problem of choice. I would have to weigh many things carefully before deciding and there would be some things that would cause quite a bit of trouble, simply because I had never formed a personal attitude toward so much. I had accepted the accepted attitudes and it had made life seem simple ...”
― Ralph Ellison

“But what a feeling can come over a man just from seeing the things he believes in and hopes for symbolized in the concrete form of a man. In something that gives a focus to all the other things he knows to be real. Something that makes unseen things manifest and allows him to come to his hopes and dreams through his outer eye and through the touch and feel of his natural hand.”
― Ralph Ellison, Juneteenth

“It was unbelievable, but perhaps only the unbelievable could be believed. Perhaps the truth was always a lie.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.”
― Ralph Ellison

“You're very insistent, but I'm very busy.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Live with your head in the lion’s mouth.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“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.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man