Ralph Ellison quotes - page 3

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. (Ralph Ellison)
...there's always an element of crime in freedom. View quote
Ralph Ellison
...the way we talk...you know that our people like to talk around a subject even when there's no danger. They enjoy it, and if they know you well enough they're apt to leave their true subject unstated so you'll have to supply the missing meaning. View quote
Ralph Ellison
It's when you feel like this that, out of resentment, you begin to bump people back. And, let me confess, you feel that way most of the time. You ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world, that you're a part of all the sound and anguish, and you strike out with your fists, you curse and you swear to make them recognize you. And, alas, it's seldom successful. View quote
Ralph Ellison
Words are everything and don't you forget it, ever. View quote
Ralph Ellison
Play the game, but don't believe in it. View quote
Ralph Ellison
Deep at the dark bottom of the melting pot, where the private is public and the public private, where black is white and white black, where the immoral becomes moral and the moral is anything that makes one feel good (or that one has the power to sustain), the white man's relish is apt to be the black man's gall. View quote
Ralph Ellison
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. View quote
Ralph Ellison
Education is all a matter of building bridges. View quote
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. View quote
Ralph Ellison
Words are your business, boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock, the answer to the question. (Ralph Ellison)
For now I had begun to believe, despite all the talk of science around me, that there was a magic in spoken words. View quote
Ralph Ellison
The work of art is, after all, an act of faith in our ability to communicate symbolically. View quote
Ralph Ellison
I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. View quote
Ralph Ellison
Let's not play these kids cheap; let's find out what they have that is a strength. What do they have that you can approach and build a bridge upon? Education is all a matter of building bridges, it seems to me. View quote
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. View quote
Ralph Ellison
Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are. View quote
Ralph Ellison
We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough. View quote
Ralph Ellison
Whence all this passion toward conformity anyway?-diversity is the word. View quote
Ralph Ellison
They were very much the same, each attempting to force his picture of reality upon me and neither giving a hoot in hell for how things looked to me. View quote
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. 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. 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. (Ralph Ellison)
Closed societies are now the flimsiest of illusions, for all the outsiders are demanding in. View quote
Ralph Ellison
But we are all human, I thought, wondering what I meant. View quote
Ralph Ellison
Perhaps the most insidious and least understood form of segregation is that of the word. [...] For if the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to blind, imprison and destroy. View quote
Ralph Ellison
...remember that the antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize clear ideas. Or as Emerson insisted, the development of consciousness, consciousness, consciousness. And with consciousness a more refined conscientiousness, and most of all, that tolerance which takes the form of humor, for when Americans can no longer laugh at each other, they have to fight one another. View quote
Ralph Ellison