Ralph Ellison > Quotes

“Dammit, white folk are always giving orders, it's a habit with them. Why didn't you make an excuse? You're black and living in the South-- did you forget how to lie?”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“By and large, the critics and readers gave me an affirmed sense of my identity as a writer. You might know this within yourself, but to have it affirmed by others is of utmost importance. Writing is, after all, a form of communication.”
― Ralph Ellison

“I could feel their eyes, saw them all and saw too the time when they would know that my prospects were ended and saw already the contempt they'd feel for me, a college man who had lost his prospects and pride. I could see it all and I knew that even the officials and the older men would despise me as though, somehow, in losing my place in Bledsoe's world I had betrayed them . . . I saw it as they looked at my overalls.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Now I have one radio-phonograph; I plan to have five. There is a certain acoustical deadness in my hole, and when I have music I want to feel its vibration, not only with my ear but with my whole body. 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 sound. Perhaps I like Louis Armstrong because he's made poetry out of being invisible. I think it's because he's unaware that he is invisible. And my own grasp of invisibility aids me to understand his music.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Poor stumblers, neither of you can see the other. To you he is a mark on the scorecard of your achievement, a thing and not a man; a child, or even less--a black amorphous thing. And you, for all your power, are not a man to him, but a God, a force--”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“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. I am not complaining, nor am I protesting either. It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“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”
― Ralph Ellision

“And in order for the Negro to fulfill his duty as a citizen it was often necessary that he fight for his self-affirmed right to fight.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“And all Negroes at some period of their lives there is that yearning for a sense of group unity that is the yearning of men for a flag: for a unity that cannot be compromised, that cannot be bought; that is conscious of itself, of its strength, that is militant.”
― Ralph Ellison

“Now you're free of illusions,' Jack said, pointing to my seed wasting upon the air. 'How does it feel to be free of one's illusions?'

And now I answered, 'Painful and empty... But look... there's your universe, and that drip-drop upon the water you hear is all the history you've made, all you're going to make”
― 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; yes, and avoided uncertain extremes of the scale.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Why, godamit, why did they insist upon confusing the class struggle with the ass struggle, debasing both us and them—all human motives?”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“that’s when you got your first peep through the crack in the wall of life and saw hell laughing like a gang of drunk farmers watching a dogfight on a country road.”
― Ralph Ellison, Juneteenth

“I yam what I yam!”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“There is in this a cruel contradiction implicit in the art form itself. For true jazz is an art of individual assertion within and against the group. Each true jazz moment (as distinct from the uninspired commercial performance) springs from a contest in which each artist challenges all the rest; each solo flight, or improvisation, represents (like the successive canvases of a painter) a definition of his identity: as individual, as member of the collectivity and as a link in the chain of tradition. Thus, because jazz finds its very life in an endless improvisation upon traditional materials, the jazzman must lose his identity even as he finds it — how often do we see even the most famous of jazz artists being devoured alive by their imitators, and, shamelessly, in the public spotlight?”
― Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act

“..and knowing now who I was and where I was and knowing too that I had no longer to run for or from the Jack's and the Emerson's and the Bledsoe's and the Norton's...but only from their confusion and impatience and refusal to recognize the beautiful absurdity of their American identity...and mine...”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Well, few men love the truth or even regard facts so dearly as to let either one upset their picture of the world. Poor Galileo, poor John Jasper; they persecuted one and laughed at the other, but both were witnesses for the truth they professed.”
― Ralph Ellison, Juneteenth

“Tell them to teach them that when they call you nigger to make a rhyme with trigger it makes the gun backfire”
― Ralph Ellison

“I'd had too many drinks. Time ran invisible, fluid, sad.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“I tried to step away and look at it from a distance of words read in books, half-remembered. For history records the patterns of men’s lives, they say: Who slept with whom and with what results; who fought and who won and who lived to lie about it afterwards. All things, it is said, are duly recorded—all things of importance, that is. But not quite, for actually it is only the known, the seen, the heard and only those events that the recorder regards as important that are put down, those lies his keepers keep their power by.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Besides, I might as well admit right now, I thought, that there are many things about people like Mary that I dislike. For one thing, they seldom know where their personalities end and yours begins; they usually think in terms of "we" while I have always tended to think in terms of "me"--and that has caused some friction, even with my own family.”
― Ralph Ellison, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man

“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

“Ride 'em, cowboy. Give 'em hell and bananas.”
― Ralph Ellison

“Power doesn’t have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“What a group of people we were, I thought. Why, you could cause us the greatest humiliation simply by confronting us with something we liked.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“He was a cop. A good citizen. But this cop had an itching finger and an eager ear for a word that rhymed with ‘trigger,’ and when Clifton fell he had found it. The Police Special spoke its lines and the rhyme was completed. Just look around you. Look at what he made, look inside you and feel his awful power. It was perfectly natural. The blood ran like blood in a comic-book killing, on a comic-book street in a comic-book town on a comic-book day in a comic-book world.”
― Ralph Ellison

“When I was praised for my conduct I felt a guilt that in some way I was doing something that was really against the wishes of the white folks, that if they had understood they would have desired me to act just the opposite, that I should have been sulky and mean, and that that really would have been what they wanted, even though they were fooled and thought they wanted me to act as I did. It made me afraid that some day they would look upon me as a traitor and I would be lost. Still I was more afraid to act any other way because they didn’t like that at all.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“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.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“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

“I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids- and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in a circus sideshow, 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