Ralph Ellison > Quotes

“My hole is warm and full of light.”
― Ralph Ellison

“You start Saul, and end up Paul,' my grandfather had often said. 'When you're a youngun, you Saul, but let life whup your head a bit and you starts to trying to be Paul – though you still Sauls around on the side.”
― Ralph Ellison - Invisible Man

“It's the little things that find us out, the little things we refuse to do in order to avoid doing the big things that can save us.”
― Ralph Ellision

“For now I had begun to believe, despite all the talk of science around me, that there was a magic in spoken words.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“The understanding of art depends finally upon one's willingness to extend one's humanity.”
― Ralph Ellison

“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.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

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

“Then in my mind's eye I see the bronze statue of the college Founder, the cold Father symbol, his hands outstretched in the breathtaking gesture of lifting a veil that flutters in hard, metallic folds above the face of a kneeling slave; and 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 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 all I find that I love. In order to get some of it down I have to love... too much of your life will be lost, its meaning lost, unless you approach it as much through love as through hate.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Be your own father, young man”
― Ralph Ellison Invisible Man

“What if history was a gambler, instead of a force in a laboratory experiment, and the boys his ace in the hole? What if history was not a reasonable citizen, but a madman full of paranoid guile and these boys his agents, his big surprise! His own revenge?”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“To see around corners is enough (that is not unusual when you are invisible). But to hear around them is too much; it inhibits action.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“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.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.”
― Ralph Waldo Ellison

“New York!" he said. "That's not a place, it's a dream.”
― Ralph Ellison

“But live you must, and you can either make passive love to your sickness or burn it out and go on to the next conflicting phase.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“He's only a man. Remember that. He's only a man!”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“His name was Clifton and he was black and they shot him. Isn’t that enough to tell? Isn’t it all you need to know?”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“The moment I entered the bright, buzzing lobby of Men’s House I was overcome by a sense of alienation and hostility … The lobby was the meeting place for various groups still caught up in the illusions that had just been boomeranged out of my head: college boys working to return to school down South; older advocates of racial progress with utopian schemes for building black business empires; preachers ordained by no authority except their own, without church or congregation, without bread or wine, body or blood; the community “leaders” without followers; old men of sixty or more still caught up in post-Civil War dreams of freedom within segregation; the pathetic ones who possessed noting beyond their dreams of being gentlemen, who held small jobs or drew small pensions, and all pretending to be engaged in some vast, though obscure, enterprise, who affected the pseudo-courtly manners of certain southern congressmen and bowed and nodded as they passed like senile old roosters in a barnyard; they younger crowd for whom I now felt a contempt such as only a disillusioned dreamer feels for those still unaware that they dream—the business students from southern colleges, for whom business was a vague, abstract game with rules as obsolete as Noah’s Ark but who yet were drunk on finance.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

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

“Can it be, I thought, can it actually be? .......could he be all of them: Rine the runner and Rine the gambler and Rine the briber and Rine the lover and Rinehart the Reverend? Could he himself be both rind and heart? .....Rinehart the rounder. It was true as I was true. His world was possibility and he knew it. He was years ahead of me and I was a fool. I must have been crazy and blind. The world in which we lived was without boundaries...All boundaries down, freedom was not only the recognition of necessity, it was the recognition of possibility. And sitting there trembling I caught a brief glimpse of the possibilities posed by Rinehart’s multiple personalities…”
― Ralph Ellison

“Power, for the writer….lies in his ability to reveal if only a little bit more about the complexity of humanity.”
― Ralph Ellison

“Which suggested to me that a novel could be fashioned as a raft of hope, perception and entertainment that might help keep us afloat as we tried to negotiate the snags and whirlpools that mark our nation’s vacillating course toward and away from the democratic ideal.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“A start is a start, and 'is' is 'is' not 'was'.”
― Ralph Ellison in Juneteenth

“I wanted peace and quiet, tranquillity, but was too much aboil inside. Somewhere beneath the load of the emotion-freezing ice which my life had conditioned my brain to produce, a spot of black anger glowed and threw off a hot red light of such intensity that had Lord Kelvin known of its existence, he would have had to revise his measurements. A remote explosion had occurred somewhere, perhaps back at Emerson's or that night in Bledsoe's office, and it had caused the ice cap to melt and shift the slightest bit. But that bit, that fraction, was irrevocable. Coming to New York had perhaps been an unconscious attempt to keep the old freezing unit going, but it hadn't worked; hot water had gotten into its coils. Only a drop, perhaps, but that drop was the first wave of the deluge. One moment I believed, I was dedicated, willing to lie on the blazing coals, do anything to attain a position on the campus -- then snap! It was done with, finished, through. Now there was only the problem of forgetting it. 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; yes, and avoided the uncertain extremes of the scale. But there was no relief. I was wild with resentment but too much under "self-control," that frozen virtue, that freezing vice. And the more resentful I became, the more my old urge to make speeches returned. While walking along the streets words would spill from my lips in a mumble over which I had little control. I became afraid of what I might do. All things were indeed awash in my mind. I longed for home.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Perhaps simple to be known, to be looked upon by so many people, to be the focal point of so many concentrating eyes, perhaps this was enough to make one different; enough to transform one into something else, someone else; just as by becoming and increasingly larger boy one became one day a man.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“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.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“I ran away into the dark, laughing so hard I feared I might rupture myself.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“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.”
― Ralph Ellison, The Collected Essays