Best 110 quotes of Ralph Ellison on MyQuotes

Ralph Ellison

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    Ralph Ellison

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

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    Ralph Ellison

    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.

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    Ralph Ellison

    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.

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    Ralph Ellison

    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.

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    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. That goes for societies as well as for individuals.

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    Ralph Ellison

    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.

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    Ralph Ellison

    At best Americans give but a limited attention to history. Too much happens too rapidly, and before we can evaluate it, or exhaust its meaning or pleasure, there is something new to concern us. Ours is the tempo of the motion picture, not that of the still camera, and we waste experience as we wasted the forest.

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    Ralph Ellison

    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.

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    Ralph Ellison

    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.

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    Ralph Ellison

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

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    Ralph Ellison

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

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    Ralph Ellison

    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.

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    Ralph Ellison

    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?

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    Ralph Ellison

    For, like almost everyone else in our country, I started out with my share of optimism. I believed in hard work and progress and action, but now, after first being 'for' society and then 'against' it, I assign myself no rank or any limit, and such an attitude is very much against the trend of the times. But my world has become one of infinite possibilities. What a phrase - still it's a good phrase and a good view of life, and a man shouldn't accept any other; that much I've learned underground. Until some gang succeeds in putting the world in a strait jacket, its definition is possibility.

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    Ralph Ellison

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

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    Ralph Ellison

    Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.

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    Ralph Ellison

    Having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge.

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    Ralph Ellison

    I am an 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.

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    Ralph Ellison

    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.

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    Ralph Ellison

    I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, 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.

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    Ralph Ellison

    I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.

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    Ralph Ellison

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

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    Ralph Ellison

    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?

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    Ralph Ellison

    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 it all, I find that I love.

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    Ralph Ellison

    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.

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    Ralph Ellison

    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.

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    Ralph Ellison

    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.

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    Ralph Ellison

    If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?

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    Ralph Ellison

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

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    Ralph Ellison

    If you can show me how I can cling to that which is real to me, while teaching me a way into the larger society, then and only then will I drop my defenses and hostility, and I will sing your praises and help you to make the desert bear fruit.

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    Ralph Ellison

    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.

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    Ralph Ellison

    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.

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    Ralph Ellison

    It goes a long way back, some twenty years. 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 everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself. But first I had to discover that I am an invisible man!

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    Ralph Ellison

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

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    Ralph Ellison

    It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.

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    Ralph Ellison

    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.

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    Ralph Ellison

    I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.

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    Ralph Ellison

    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.

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    Ralph Ellison

    Life is as the sea, art a ship in which man conquers life's crushing formlessness, reducing it to a course, a series of swells, tides and wind currents inscribed on a chart.

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    Ralph Ellison

    Light confirms my reality, gives birth to my form...without light I am not only invisible but formless as well; and to be unaware of one's form is to live a death...the truth is the light and light is the truth.

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    Ralph Ellison

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

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    Ralph Ellison

    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.

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    Ralph Ellison

    Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.

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    Ralph Ellison

    My hole is warm and full of light.

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    Ralph Ellison

    Our task, then always, is to challenge the apparent forms of reality-that is, the fixed manner and values of the few, and to struggle with it until it reveals its mad, vari-implicated chaos, its false face, and so on until it surrenders its insight, its truth.

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    Ralph Ellison

    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.

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    Ralph Ellison

    Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.

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    Ralph Ellison

    Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.

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    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.

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    Ralph Ellison

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