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Ralph Ellison: 164 quotes6 likes

“…the end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.”

Ralph Ellison book Invisible Man

Prologue.
Invisible Man (1952)

“Words are your business, boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock, the answer to the question.”

“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.”

Ralph Ellison book Invisible Man

Source: Invisible Man

“A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.”

Ralph Ellison book Invisible Man

Prologue.
Source: Invisible Man (1952)

“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.”

Ralph Ellison book Invisible Man

Epilogue.
Source: Invisible Man (1952)

“America is woven of many strands; I would recognize them and let it so remain. It's "winner take nothing" that is the great truth of our country or of any country. Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat. Our fate is to become one, and yet many— This is not prophecy, but description.”

Ralph Ellison book Invisible Man

Epilogue.
Source: Invisible Man (1952)

“I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time been ashamed.”

Ralph Ellison book Invisible Man

Source: Invisible Man (1952), Chapter 1.

“And I knew that it was better to live out one's own absurdity than to die for that of others.”

Ralph Ellison book Invisible Man

Variant: And I knew that it was better to live out one's own absurdity than to die for that of others.
Source: Invisible Man (1952), Chapter 25.

“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?”

Ralph Ellison book Invisible Man

Source: Invisible Man (1952), Chapter 23.

“They could laugh at him but they couldn't ignore him”

Ralph Ellison book Invisible Man

Source: Invisible Man

“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 book Invisible Man

Source: Invisible Man (1952), Chapter 17.

“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.”

Ralph Ellison book Invisible Man

Source: Invisible Man (1952), Chapter 9

“The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.”

Ralph Ellison book Shadow and Act

Shadow and Act (New York: Random House, 1964), Introduction, p. xix; in The Collected Essays, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1995), p. 56.

“And yet I am what they think I am.”

Ralph Ellison book Invisible Man

Source: Invisible Man (1952), Chapter 17.

“I denounce because though implicated and partially responsible, I have been hurt to the point of abysmal pain, hurt to the point of invisibility. And I defend because in spite of all I find that I love. In order to get some of it down I have to love. I sell you no phony forgiveness, I'm a desperate man—but too much of your life will be lost, its meaning lost, unless you approach it as much through love as through hate. So I approach it through division. So I denounce and I defend and I hate and I love.”

Ralph Ellison book Invisible Man

Epilogue.
Invisible Man (1952)

“The clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.”

Ralph Ellison book Invisible Man

Source: Invisible Man (1952), Chapter 14.

“The work of art is, after all, an act of faith in our ability to communicate symbolically.”

"The Little Man at Chehaw Station" (1978), in The Collected Essays, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1995), p. 503.

“…you both fail to understand what is happening to you. You cannot see or hear or smell the truth of what you see — and you, looking for destiny! It’s classic! And the boy, this automaton, he was made of the very mud of the region and sees far less than you. Poor stumblers, neither of you can see the other. To you he is a mark on the score-card of your achievement, a thing and not a man; a child, or even less — a black, amorphous thing. And you, for all your power, are not a man to him, but a God, a force…”

Ralph Ellison book Invisible Man

Source: Invisible Man (1952), Chapter 3.

“…to hell with being ashamed of what you liked.”

Ralph Ellison book Invisible Man

Source: Invisible Man (1952), Chapter 13.

“Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.”

"The Essential Ellison", interview by Ishmael Reed in Y'Bird 1, no. 1 (1978): 130-59.