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Ralph Ellison Quotes
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Ralph Waldo Ellison was an American novelist, literary critic, and scholar best known for his novel Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award in 1953. He also wrote Shadow and Act , a collection of political, social and critical essays, and Going to the Territory . For The New York Times, the best of these essays in addition to the novel put him "among the gods of America's literary Parnassus." A posthumous novel, Juneteenth, was published after being assembled from voluminous notes he left upon his death.



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✵ 1. March 1914 – 16. April 1994  •  Other names رالف الیسون, Ռալֆ Էլլիսոն, رالف إيلسون
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Ralph Ellison: 82 quotes6 likes

Ralph Ellison Quotes

“…there are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.”

Ralph Ellison book Invisible Man

Prologue.
Invisible Man (1952)

“…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 book Invisible Man

Epilogue.
Invisible Man (1952)

“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 book Invisible Man

Source: Invisible Man (1952), Chapter 23.

“Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled "File and forget."”

Ralph Ellison book Invisible Man

Epilogue.
Invisible Man (1952)

“It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.”

Ralph Ellison book Invisible Man

Prologue.
Invisible Man (1952)

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

Ralph Ellison book Three Days Before the Shooting...

Source: Three Days Before the Shooting... (2010), p. 311.

“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 book Invisible Man

Prologue (opening paragraph of novel).
Invisible Man (1952)

“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.”

Ralph Ellison

"Remembering Jimmy" (1958), in The Collected Essays, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1995), p. 277.

“Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.”

Ralph Ellison book Invisible Man

Source: Invisible Man (1952), Chapter 1.

“Man's hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or a moaning dove.”

Ralph Ellison book Invisible Man

Source: Invisible Man (1952), Chapter 5.

“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.”

Ralph Ellison

"Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke" (1958), in The Collected Essays, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1955), p. 104.

“Closed societies are now the flimsiest of illusions, for all the outsiders are demanding in.”

Ralph Ellison

"Society, Morality and the Novel" (1957), in The Collected Essays, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1995), p. 726.

“But we are all human, I thought, wondering what I meant.”

Ralph Ellison book Invisible Man

Source: Invisible Man (1952), Chapter 11.

“Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty.”

Ralph Ellison

"Society, Morality and the Novel" (1957), in The Collected Essays, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1995), p. 699.

“The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy, but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.”

Ralph Ellison

"Richard Wright's Blues" (1945), in The Collected Essays, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1995), p. 129.

“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.”

Ralph Ellison

As quoted in "An American Novelist Who Sometimes Teaches" by John Corry http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/06/20/specials/ellison-teaches.html in The New York Times (20 November 1966).

“God is love, I said, but art's the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.”

Ralph Ellison book Three Days Before the Shooting...

Source: Three Days Before the Shooting... (2010), p. 987.

“I recall the sudden arpeggios of laughter lilting across the tender, springtime grass — gay-welling, far-floating, fluent, spontaneous, a bell-like feminine fluting, then suppressed; as though snuffed swiftly and irrevocably beneath the quiet solemnity of the vespered air now vibrant with somber chapel bells.”

Ralph Ellison book Invisible Man

Source: Invisible Man (1952), Chapter 5.