List of Ralph Ellison Quotes

I Am An Invisible Man. No, I Am Not A Spook Like Those Who Haunted Edgar Allan Poe; Nor Am I One Of Your Hollywood-movie Ectoplasms.

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.

Commercial Rock 'n' Roll Music Is A Brutalization Of The Stream Of Contemporary Negro Church Music An Obscene Looting Of A Cultural Expression.

All Novels Are About Certain Minorities: The Individual Is A Minority.

I Suspect That All The Agony That Goes Into Writing Is Borne Precisely Because The Writer Longs For Acceptance-but It Must Be Acceptance On His Own Terms.

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.

When American Life Is Most American It Is Apt To Be Most Theatrical.

...and Yet I Am What They Think I Am.

Many Of The Rites Of Passage, Those Rituals Of Growing Up Found In Our Society, Are In The Form Of Such Comic, Practical Joking Affairs--which We Ignore In The Belief That They Possess No Deeper Significance. Yet It Is Precisely In Their Being Regarded As Unimportant That They Take On Importance. For In Them We Ritualize And Dramatize Attitudes Which Contradict And Often Embarrass The Sacred Values Which We Proclaim Through Our Solemn Ceremonies And Rituals Of Nationhood.

I Blundered Into Writing.

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.

My Hole Is Warm And Full Of Light.

I Was Pulled This Way And That For Longer Than I Can Remember. And My Problem Was That I Always Tried To Go In Everyone's Way But My Own. I Have Also Been Called One Thing And Then Another While No One Really Wished To Hear What I Called Myself. So After Years Of Trying To Adopt The Opinions Of Others I Finally Rebelled. I Am An Invisible Man.

Having Tried To Give Pattern To The Chaos Which Lives Within The Pattern Of Your Certainties, I Must Come Out, I Must Emerge.

In Those Days It Was Either Live With Music Or Die With Noise, And We Chose Rather Desperately To Live.

The Antidote To Hubris, To Overweening Pride, Is Irony, That Capacity To Discover And Systematize Ideas.

And The Mind That Has Conceived A Plan Of Living Must Never Lose Sight Of The Chaos Against Which That Pattern Was Conceived. That Goes For Societies As Well As For Individuals.

If Only All The Contradictory Voices Shouting In 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.

We Don't All Dig Shakespeare Uniformly, Or Even 'little Red Riding Hood.' The Understanding Of Art Depends Finally Upon One's Willingness To Extend One's Humanity And One's Knowledge Of Human Life.

I Feel The Need To Reaffirm All Of It, The Whole Unhappy Territory And All The Things Loved And Unloveable In It, For It Is All Part Of Me.

I Suddenly Recall The Arpeggios Of Laughter Lilting Across The Tender, Springtime Grass-gay-welling, Far-floating, Fluent, Spontaneous, A Bell-like Feminine Fluting, Then Suppressed; As Though Snuffed Swiftly And Irrevocably Beneath The Quiet Solemnity Of The Vespered Air Now Vibrant With Somber Chapel Bells.

Please, A Definition: A Hibernation Is A Covert Preparation For A More Overt Action.

America Is Woven Of Many Strands; I Would Recognize Them And Let It So Remain. It's 'winner Take Nothing' That Is The Great Truth Of Our Country Or Of Any Country. Life Is To Be Lived, Not Controlled; And Humanity Is Won By Continuing To Play In Face Of Certain Defeat. Our Fate Is To Become One, And Yet Many - This In Not Prophecy, But Description.

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.