Ralph Ellison Quotes
Collection of top 96 famous quotes about Ralph Ellison
Ralph Ellison Quotes & Sayings
Happy to read and share the best inspirational Ralph Ellison quotes, sayings and quotations on Wise Famous Quotes.
And yet I am what they think I am.
— Ralph Ellison
The clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.
— Ralph Ellison
It was unbelievable, but perhaps only the unbelievable could be believed. Perhaps the truth was always a lie.
— Ralph Ellison
The work of art is, after all, an act of faith in our ability to communicate symbolically.
— Ralph Ellison
When I discover who I am, I'll be free.
— Ralph Ellison
Running from the birds to what, I didn't know. I ran. Why was I here at all? I ran through the night, ran within myself. Ran.
— Ralph Ellison
In order to travel far you have to be detached.
— Ralph Ellison
I could hardly get to sleep for dreaming of revenge.
— Ralph Ellison
An illusion was creating a counter-illusion. Where would it end? Did they believe their own propaganda? Afterwards
— Ralph Ellison
Nothing ever stops; it divides and multiplies, and I guess sometimes it gets ground down superfine, but it doesn't just blow away.
— Ralph Ellison
Power, for the writer ... .lies in his ability to reveal if only a little bit more about the complexity of humanity.
— Ralph Ellison
If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?
— Ralph Ellison
And I knew that it was better to live out one's absurdity than to die for that of others.
— Ralph Ellison
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?
— Ralph Ellison
I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
— 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
His name was Clifton and he was black and they shot him. Isn't that enough to tell? Isn't it all you need to know?
— Ralph Ellison
Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.
— Ralph Ellison
I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
— Ralph Ellison
Boy on a Train From
— 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.
— Ralph Ellison
Imitation is suicide, envy is ignorance.
— Ralph Ellison
The understanding of art depends finally upon one's willingness to extend one's humanity and one's knowledge of human life.
— Ralph Ellison
But live you must, and you can either make passive love to your sickness or burn it out and go on to the next conflicting phase.
— Ralph Ellison
Times are grave and you seem very indignant.
— Ralph Ellison
I am nobody but myself.
— Ralph Ellison
Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled 'file and forget.'
— Ralph Ellison
Though invisible I would be their assuring voice of denial;
— Ralph Ellison
The world is just as concrete, ornery, vile, and sublimely wonderful as before, only now I better understand my relation to it and it to me.
— Ralph Ellison
Education is all a matter of building bridges.
— Ralph Ellison
And in order for the Negro to fulfill his duty as a citizen it was often necessary that he fight for his self-affirmed right to fight.
— Ralph Ellison
Let man keep his many parts and you'll have no tyrant states.
— Ralph Ellison
The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
— Ralph Ellison
too much of your life will be lost, its meaning lost, unless you approach it as much through love as through hate.
— Ralph Ellison
The world is a possibility if only you'll discover it.
— Ralph Ellison
They could laugh at him but they couldn't ignore him
— Ralph Ellison
I'd been so fascinated by the notion, that I'd forgotten to measure what it was bringing forth. I'd been asleep, dreaming.
— Ralph Ellison
The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
— Ralph Ellison
The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
— Ralph Ellison
For their most innocent words were acts of violence to which we of the campus were hypersensitive though we endured them not.
— Ralph Ellison
Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
— Ralph Ellison
Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
— Ralph Ellison
Live with your head in the lion's mouth.
— Ralph Ellison
You're very insistent, but I'm very busy.
— Ralph Ellison
But on the other hand, it would be a great mistake to assume that the dead are absolutely powerless.
— Ralph Ellison
All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was.
— Ralph Ellison
How could you treat a Negro as equal in war and then deny him equality during times of
— Ralph Ellison
Man's hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.
— Ralph Ellison
Some things are just too unjust for words, and too ambiguous for either speech or ideas.
— Ralph Ellison
Gin, jazz and dreams were not enough.
— Ralph Ellison
Ride 'em, cowboy. Give 'em hell and bananas.
— Ralph Ellison
The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
— Ralph Ellison
Call me Jack-the-Bear, for I am in a state of hibernation.
— Ralph Ellison
Be your own father, young man
— Ralph Ellison
because what is commonly assumed to be past history is actually as much a part of the living present as William Faulkner insisted.
— Ralph Ellison
He's only a man. Remember that. He's only a man!
— Ralph Ellison
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.
— 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.
— Ralph Ellison
He only wanted to use me for something. Everyone wanted to use you for some purpose.
— Ralph Ellison
while fiction is but a form of symbolic action, a mere game of "as if," therein lies its true function and its potential for effecting change.
— 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.
— 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.
— Ralph Ellison
In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
— Ralph Ellison
My hole is warm and full of light.
— Ralph Ellison
Hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
— Ralph Ellison
Dr. Gordon S. Seagrave, the famous "Burma Surgeon.
— Ralph Ellison
Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
— Ralph Ellison
they could talk and agree with themselves, the world was nailed down, and they loved it. They received a feeling of security.
— Ralph Ellison
A start is a start, and 'is' is 'is' not 'was'.
— Ralph Ellison
God is love, I said, but art's the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.
— Ralph Ellison
All it takes to get along in this here man's town is a little shit, grit, and mother-wit.
— Ralph Ellison
But we are all human, I thought, wondering what I meant.
— Ralph Ellison
Tell them to teach them that when they call you nigger to make a rhyme with trigger it makes the gun backfire
— Ralph Ellison
To see around corners is enough (that is not unusual when you are invisible). But to hear around them is too much; it inhibits action.
— Ralph Ellison
If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to blind, imprison, and destroy.
— Ralph Ellison
All dreamers and sleepwalkers must pay the price, and even the invisible victim is responsible for the fate of all.
— Ralph Ellison
To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
— Ralph Ellison
All boundaries down, freedom was not only the recognition of necessity, it was the recognition of possibility.
— Ralph Ellison
Beware of those who speak of the spiral of history; they are preparing a boomerang. Keep a steel helmet handy
— 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
And sometimes the difference between individual and organized indignation is the difference between criminal and political action.
— Ralph Ellison
The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
— Ralph Ellison
