Ralph Ellison Quotes

Ralph Ellison's reflections feel deep and probing, exploring identity, writing and the nature of art.

49 quotes

1. The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.

2. Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself out of those values.

3. Commercial rock 'n' roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music : an obscene looting of a cultural expression.

4. I am a novelist, not an activist... But I think that no one who reads what I write or who listens to my lectures can doubt that I am enlisted in the freedom movement. As an individual, I am primarily responsible for the health of American literature and culture. When I write, I am trying to make sense out of chaos. To think that a writer must think about his Negroness is to fall into a trap.

5. Invisible Man

6. America is woven of many strands. I would recognise them and let it so remain. Our fate is to become one, and yet many. This is not prophecy, but description.

7. 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.

8. Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.

9. Education is all a matter of building bridges.

10. Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.

11. Hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.

12. I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed.

13. If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to blind, imprison, and destroy.

14. Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.

15. 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.

16. The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstances, whether created by others or by one's own human failing.

17. The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.

18. The understanding of art depends finally upon one's willingness to extend one's humanity and one's knowledge of human life.

19. There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.

20. 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.

21. When I discover who I am, I'll be free.

22. Play the game, but don't believe in it.

23. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass.

24. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination-indeed, everything and anything except me.

25. It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.

26. All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naive. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization that everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself.

27. :[T]o 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.

28. 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.

29. Everywhere I've turned somebody has wanted to sacrifice me for my own good—only /they/ were the ones who benefited. And now we start on the old sacrificial merry-go-round. At what point do we stop?

30. Power, for the writer…lies in his ability to reveal if only a little bit more about the complexity of humanity.

31. 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.

32. And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone's way but my own.

33. 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?

34. 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.

35. 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.

36. Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled 'file and forget.'

37. All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.

38. And I knew that it was better to live out one's absurdity than to die for that of others.

39. All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority. The universal in the novel-and isn't that what we're all clamoring for these days?-is reached only through the depiction of the specific man in a specific circumstance.

40. That which we remember is, more often than not, that which we would like to have been; or that which we hope to be. Thus our memory and our identity are ever at odds; our history ever a tale told by inattentive idealists.

41. God is love, I said, but art's the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.

42. 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.

43. I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.

44. I remember that I'm invisible and walk softly so as not awake the sleeping ones. Sometimes it is best not to awaken them; there are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.

45. Man's hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.

46. All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naïve. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: that I am nobody but myself.

47. 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.

48. 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.

49. The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstance whether created by others or by one's own human failings. They are the only consistent art in the United States which constantly remind us of our limitations while encouraging us to see how far we can actually go. When understood in their more profound implication, they are a corrective, an attempt to draw a line upon man's own limitless assertion.