Ralph Ellison quotes

Ralph Ellison was an American novelist and essayist, most famous for his novel "Invisible Man." His work explored themes of identity, race, and individuality in American society. He remains a towering figure in twentieth-century American literature. Here are 88 of his quotes:

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. (Ralph Ellison)
...there must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientist, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale. View quote
Ralph Ellison
The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike. View quote
Ralph Ellison
...the end is in the beginning and lies far ahead. View quote
Ralph Ellison
A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action. View quote
Ralph Ellison
I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time been ashamed. View quote
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. View quote
Ralph Ellison
Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by. View quote
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. View quote
Ralph Ellison
Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked. View quote
Ralph Ellison
...there are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers. (Ralph Ellison)
When I discover who I am, I'll be free. View quote
Ralph Ellison
And I knew that it was better to live out one's own absurdity than to die for that of others. View quote
Ralph Ellison
Everywhere I've turned somebody has wanted to sacrifice me for my 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? View quote
Ralph Ellison
Perhaps everyone loved someone; I didn't know, I couldn't give much thought to love; in order to travel far you had to be detached, and I had a long road back to the campus before me. View quote
Ralph Ellison
...the world is possibility if only you'll discover it. View quote
Ralph Ellison
Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat. View quote
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. View quote
Ralph Ellison
Sometimes I feel the need to reaffirm all of it, the whole unhappy territory and all the things loved and unlovable in it, for all of it is part of me. View quote
Ralph Ellison
At best Americans give but 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. View quote
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. (Ralph Ellison)
The understanding of art depends finally upon one's willingness to extend one's humanity and one's knowledge of human life. View quote
Ralph Ellison
If only all the contradictory voices shouting inside my head would calm down and sing a song in unison, whatever it was I wouldn't care so long as they sang without dissonance. View quote
Ralph Ellison
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. View quote
Ralph Ellison
Man's hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or a moaning dove. View quote
Ralph Ellison