Ralph Ellison > Quotes

“And who can blame those who don’t feel that they have to worry about the complicated truths we have to struggle with? In this country men can be born and live well and die without ever having to feel much of what makes their ease possible, just because so much is buried under all of this black and white mess that in their ignorance some folks accept it as a natural condition. But then again, maybe they just feel that the whole earth would blow up if even a handful of folks got to digging into it. It would even seem a shame to expose it, to have it known that so much has been built on top of such a shaky foundation. But look, Hickman—Alonzo … this is here and now and the stuff has begun to bubble. The man who fell and the man lying there on the bed is the child, Bliss. That’s the mystery. How did he become the child of that babyhood … father to the man, as it goes? And how could he have been my child, nephew and grandchild and brother-in-Christ as he grew? The confounding mystery of it has to be struggled with and I wish it was all a lie and and we could go back home and forget it.”
― Ralph Ellison, Juneteenth

“As the advertising industry, which is dedicated to the creation of masks, makes clear, that which cannot gain authority from tradition may borrow it with a mask.”
― Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act

“It was unbelievably wild. Some continued to shout threats in their outrage and frustration, while others, both men and women, filled the air with a strangely brokenhearted and forlorn sound of weeping, and the officers found it difficult to disperse them. In fact, they continued to mill angrily about even as firemen in asbestos suits broke through, dragging hoses from a roaring pumper truck and spraying the flaming car with a foamy chemical, which left it looking like the offspring of some strange animal brought so traumatically and precipitantly to life that it wailed and sputtered in protest, both against the circumstance of its debut into the world and the foaming presence of its still-clinging afterbirth....”
― Ralph Ellison, Three Days Before the Shooting...

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

― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man”
― Ralph Ellison

“collectivity of politically astute citizens who, by virtue of our vaunted system of universal education and our freedom of opportunity, would be prepared to govern.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“The work of art is, after all, an act of faith in our ability to communicate symbolically.”
― Ralph Ellison, Going to the Territory

“Until some gang succeeds in putting the world in a strait jacket, its definition is possibility.”
― Ralph Ellison

“Then I was amused: Something in this man’s thick head had sprung out and beaten him within an inch of his life. I began to laugh at this crazy discovery. Would he have awakened at the point of death? Would Death himself have freed him for wakeful living? But I didn’t linger. I ran away into the dark, laughing so hard I feared I might rupture myself. The next day I saw his picture in the Daily News, beneath a caption stating that he had been ‘mugged.’ Poor fool, poor blind fool, I thought with sincere compassion, mugged by an invisible man!”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“So still and silent that they clash with the crowd in their very immobility; standing noisy in their silence; harsh as a cry of terror in their quietness.”
― Ralph Ellison

“Well, you had better speak more slowly so we can understand. We mean to do right by you, but you've got to know your place at all times. All right, now, go on with your speech.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“He only wanted to use me for something. Everyone wanted to use you for some purpose.”
― Ralph Ellison

“After such knowledge, and given the persistence of racial violence and the unavailability of legal protection, I asked myself, what else was there to sustain our will to persevere but laughter?”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Our fate is to become one, and yet many— This is not prophecy, but description.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“No, you could never tell where you were going, that was a sure thing. The only sure thing. Nor could you tell how you’d get there—though when you arrived it was somehow right.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Stephen’s problem, like ours, was not actually one of creating the uncreated conscience of his race, but of creating the uncreated features of his face. Our task is that of making ourselves individuals. The conscience of a race is the gift of its individuals who see, evaluate, record… 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

“Such was the short bitter life of Brother Tod Clifton. Now he's in this box with the bolts tightened down. He's in the box and we're in there with him, and when I've told you this you can go. It's dark in this box and it's crowded. It has a cracked ceiling and a clogged-up toilet in the hall. It has rats and roaches, and it's far, far too expensive a dwelling. The air is bad and it'll be cold this winter. Tod Clifton is crowded and he needs the room. 'Tell them to get out of the box', that's what he would say if you could hear him. 'Tell them to get out of the box and go teach the cops to forget that rhyme. Tell them to teach them that when they call you nigger to make a rhyme with trigger it makes the gun backfire.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Thus for one lone stretch of time I lived with the intensity displayed by those chronic numbers players who see clues to their fortune in the most minute and insignificant phenomena: in clouds, on passing trucks and subway cars, in dreams, comic strips, the shape of dog-luck fouled on the pavements. I was dominated by the all-embracing idea of Brotherhood. The organization had given the world a new shape, and me a vital role. We recognized no loose ends, everything could be controlled by our science. Life was all pattern and discipline; and the beauty of discipline is when it works. And it was working very well.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Leaving him and going out into the paint-fuming air I had the feeling that I had been talking beyond myself, had used words and expressed attitudes not my own, that I was in the grip of some alien personality lodged deep within me. Like the servant about whom I'd read in psychology class who, during a trance, had recited pages of Greek philosophy which she had overheard one day while she worked. It was as though I were acting out a scene from some crazy movie. Or perhaps I was catching up with myself and had put into words feelings which I had hitherto suppressed. Or was it, I thought, starting up the walk, that I was no longer afraid? I stopped, looking at the buildings down the bright street slanting with sun and shade. 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. Was that it? I felt light-headed, my ears were ringing. I went on.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“a delegate shout out from the floor: “Peonage, Anti-Lynch Bill, poll tax, these are our issues. They are the most controversial issues in American life, and some of us will have to die for them! Yes, we want to join with the CIO! We cannot stop for controversy!” And there in the faces of my people I saw strength. There with the whites in the audience I saw the positive forces of civilization and the best guarantee of America’s future.”
― Ralph Ellison

“And the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Thus despite the bland assertions of sociologists, “high visibility” actually rendered one un -visible—whether at high noon in Macy’s window or illuminated by flaming torches and flashbulbs while undergoing the ritual sacrifice that was dedicated to the ideal of white supremacy. After such knowledge, and given the persistence of racial violence and the unavailability of legal protection, I asked myself, what else was there to sustain our will to persevere but laughter?”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“During these times of indecision when all the old answers are proven false, the people look back to the dead to give them a clue, they call first upon one and then upon another of those who have acted in the past.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“America is woven of many strands; I would recognize them and let it so remain.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“The streets were full of hurrying people who walked as though they had been wound up and were directed by some unseen control. Many of the men carried dispatch cases and brief cases and I gripped mine with a sense of importance. And here and there I saw Negroes who hurried along with leather pouches strapped to their wrists. They reminded me fleetingly of prisoners carrying their leg irons as they escaped from a chain gang. Yet they seemed aware of some self-importance, and I wished to stop one and ask him why he was chained to his pouch. Maybe they got paid well for this, maybe they were chained to money. Perhaps the man with rundown heels ahead of me was chained to a million dollars!”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Nor could I see any reason for allowing our more chastened view of political possibility (not too long before I began this novel A. Phillip Randolph had to threaten our beloved F.D.R. with a march on Washington before our war industries were opened to Negroes) to impose undue restrictions upon my novelist’s freedom to manipulate imaginatively those possibilities that existed both in Afro-American personality and in the restricted structure of American society. My task was to transcend those restrictions.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Don’t you know the quickest way to die is to retire?”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“I want you to overcome 'em with yeses, undermine 'em with grins, agree 'em to death and destruction, let 'em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“An illusion was creating a counter-illusion. Where would it end? Did they believe their own propaganda? Afterwards”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Without light I am not only invisible, but formless as well; and to be unaware of one’s form is to live a death.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“They were all such a part of that other life that's dead that I can't remember them all. (Time was as I was, but neither that time nor that "I" are anymore.)”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man