Ralph Ellison Quotes: top 96 famous quotes about Ralph Ellison

Ralph Ellison Quotes & Sayings

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And yet I am what they think I am. — Ralph Ellison

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

Nothing, storm or flood, must get in the way of our need for light and ever more and brighter light. The truth is the light and light is the truth. — 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

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

When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical. — 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

Boo'ful," she said, "life could be so diff'rent - "
"But it never is," I said. — 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

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. — 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

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

We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough. — 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

Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself. — 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

I ran away into the dark, laughing so hard I feared I might rupture myself. — Ralph Ellison

Do they come to bury the others or to be entombed to give life or to receive it? — 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 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. — 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

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

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. — Ralph Ellison