Ralph Ellison > Quotes

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

“Nothing ever stops; it divides and multiplies, and I guess sometimes it gets ground down superfine, but it doesn't just blow away.”
― Ralph Ellison, Juneteenth

“And I love light. Perhaps you'll think it strange that an invisible man should need light, desire light, love light. But maybe it is exactly because I am invisible. Light confirms my reality, gives birth to my form.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“I'd like to hear five recordings of Louis Armstrong playing and singing "What Did I Do to Be so Black and Blue"-all at the same time. Sometimes now I listen to Louis while I have my favorite dessert of vanilla ice cream and sloe gin. I pour the red liquid over the white mound, watching it glisten and the vapor rising as Louis bends that military instrument into a beam of lyrical sound.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“You're a Black educated fool, son. These white folk have newspapers, magazines, radios, spokesmen to get their ideas across. If they want to tell the world a lie, they can tell it so well that it becomes the truth; and if I tell them you're lying, they'll tell the world even if you prove you're telling the truth. Because it's the kind of lie they want to hear.”
― Ralph Ellison

“Yes, they think we're dumb. They call us the "common people." But I've been sitting here listening and looking and trying to understand what's so common about us. I think they're guilty of a gross mis-statement of fact-we are the uncommon people-”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“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

“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, Invisible Man

“These white folk have newspapers, magazines, radios, spokesmen to get their ideas across. If they want to tell the world a lie, they can tell it so well that it becomes the truth; and if I tell them that you’re lying, they’ll tell the world even if you prove you’re telling the truth. Because it’s the kind of lie they want to hear …”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“I can hear you say, "What a horrible, irresponsible bastard!" And you're right. I leap to agree with you. 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? And wait until I reveal how truly irresponsible I am. Responsibility rests upon recognition, and recognition is a form of agreement.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“And I defend because in spite of all I find that I love. In order to get some of it down I have to love. I sell you no phony forgiveness, I'm a desperate man – but too much of your life will be lost, its meaning lost, unless you approach it as much through love as through hate. So I approach it through division so I denounce and I defend and I hate and I love.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“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.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Come out of the fog, young man. And remember you don't have to be a complete fool in order to succeed. Play the game, but don't believe in it--that much you owe yourself. Even if it lands you in a strait jacket or a padded cell. Play the game, but play it your own way--part of the time at least. Play the game, but raise the ante, my boy. Learn how it operates, learn how you operate--I wish I had time to tell you only a fragment.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“I felt that even when they were polite they hardly saw me, that they would have begged the pardon of Jack the Bear, never glancing his way if the bear happened to be walking along minding his business. It was confusing. I did not know if it was desirable or undesirable...”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Who am I? But it was like trying to identify one particular cell that coursed through the torpid veins of my body. Maybe I was just this blackness and bewilderment and pain, but that seemed less like a suitable answer than something I'd read somewhere.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“But that's getting too far ahead of the story, almost to the end, although the end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Once I saw a prizefighter boxing a yokel. The fighter was swift and
amazingly scientific. His body was one violent flow of rapid rhythmic action.
He hit the yokel a hundred times while the yokel held up his arms in
stunned surprise. But suddenly the yokel, rolling about in the gale of boxing
gloves, struck one blow and knocked science, speed and footwork as cold as a
Well-digger's posterior. The smart money hit the canvas. The long shot got the
nod. The yokel had simply stepped inside of his opponent's sense of time.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“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.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“I'd been so fascinated by the notion, that I'd forgotten to measure what it was bringing forth. I'd been asleep, dreaming.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“All dreamers and sleepwalkers must pay the price, and even the invisible victim is responsible for the fate of all.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“They were blind, bat blind, moving only by the echoed sounds of their own voices. And because they were blind they would destroy themselves and I'd help them. I laughed. Here I had thought they accepted me because they felt that color made no difference, when in reality it made no difference because they didn't see either color or men . . . For all they were concerned, we were so many names scribbled on fake ballots, to be used at their convenience and when not needed to be filed away. It was a joke, an absurd joke.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“i am invisible understand, simply because people refuse to see me”
― Ralph Ellison

“Not only could you travel upward toward success but you could travel downward as well; up and down, in retreat as well as in advance, crabways and crossways and around in a circle, meeting your old selves coming and going and perhaps all at the same time.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“My hole is warm and full of light. Yes, full of light. I doubt if there is a brighter spot in all New York than this hole of mine, and I do not exclude Broadway. Or the Empire State Building on a photographer's dream night. But that is taking advantage of you. Those two spots are among the darkest of our whole civilization...which might sound like a hoax, or a contradiction, but that (by contradiction, I mean) is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“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.”
― Ralph Ellison in Juneteenth

“We shall demonstrate once again that in this great, inventive land man’s idlest dreams are but the blueprints and mockups of emerging realities, technologies and poems. Here in the fashion of our pioneer forefathers, who confronted the mysteries of wilderness, mountain and prairie with crude tools and a self-generating imagination, we are committed to facing with courage the enormous task of imposing an ever more humane order upon this bewilderingly diversified and constantly changing society. Committed we are to maintaining its creative momentum.”
― Ralph Ellison, Juneteenth

“We create the race by creating ourselves and then to our great astonishment we will have created something far more important: We will have created a culture. Why waste time creating a conscience for something that doesn't exist? For, you see, blood and skin do not think!”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“At best Americans give but a limited attention to history. Too much happens too rapidly, and before we can evaluate it, or exhaust its meaning or pleasure, there is something new to concern us. Ours is the tempo of the motion picture, not that of the still camera, and we waste experience as we wasted the forest.”
― Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act

“Nothing, storm or flood, must get in the way of our need for light and ever more and brighter light. The truth is the light and light is the truth.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Boo'ful," she said, "life could be so diff'rent—"
"But it never is," I said.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man