Ralph Ellison Quotes

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

The truth is the light and the light is the truth.

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

They could laugh at him but they couldn’t ignore him.

That I am nobody but myself.

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

After years of trying to adopt the opinions of others I finally rebelled. I am an invisible man.

It is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass.

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.

Perhaps everyone loved someone; I didn’t now, I couldn’t give much thought to love.

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.

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.

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.

America is woven of many strands. I would recognise them and let it so remain. Our fate is to become one, and yet many.

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

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

The world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.

What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?

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

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. No one was satisfied.

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.

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

Play the game, but don’t believe in it – that much you owe yourself … Play the game, but raise the ante, my boy. Learn how it operates, learn how you operate.

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

“God is love, I said, but art’s the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.”

“Words of Emancipation didn’t arrive until the middle of June so they called it Juneteenth. So that was it, the night of Juneteenth celebration, his mind went on. The celebration of a gaudy illusion.”

“He’s holding on even though Death is around somewhere close by- as he always is. I’ll just have to try once more to outwait him, to outface him, even though I’ve seen enough even for an old preacher like me...”

“It’s the little things that find us out, the little things we refuse to do in order to avoid doing the big things that can save us.”

“Nothing ever stops; it divides and multiplies, and I guess sometimes it gets ground down superfine, but it doesn’t just blow away.”

“If we’d been the kind to depend on the sword instead of the Lord, we’d been in our graves long ago.”

“Meaning grows with the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.”

“So let us pray, not for him but for overselves and for all those whose job it is to wear those great big shoes he left this nation to fill...”

“Give a man wood, and he will learn-to make fire. Give him new land and he will learn to live My way.”

“Not back to that me, not to that six-seven year old ventriloquist’s dummy dressed in a white evening suit. Not to that charlatan born-must I have no charity for me?

“Politics is an art of maneuvering, and to move them you must change home base.”

“You know that we were born of sacrifice, and that we have had to live by a different truth and that that truth is good and the vision of manhood it stands for is more human, more desirable, more real.”

″... on this great day of deliverance, on this day of emancipation, let’s us tell ourselves our story...”