Ralph Ellison Quotes - Page 3

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

  Ralph Ellison

  Mind, Shapes, Form

  Ralph Ellison (2010). “Three Days Before the Shooting . . .”, p.311, Modern Library

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

  Ralph Ellison

  Way, Problem, My Own

  Ralph Ellison (2010). “Invisible Man”, p.586, Vintage

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• I'm not a separatist. The imagination is integrative. That's how you make the new -- by putting something else with what you've got. And I'm unashamedly an American integrationist.

  Ralph Ellison

  Imagination

  Ralph Ellison, Maryemma Graham, Amritjit Singh (1995). “Conversations with Ralph Ellison”, p.235, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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

  Ralph Ellison

  Solitude, Unseen, Nerves

  Ralph Ellison (2010). “Invisible Man”, p.28, Vintage

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• 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 in not prophecy, but description.

  Ralph Ellison

  Life, Country, Fate

  Ralph Ellison (2010). “Invisible Man”, p.590, Vintage

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• Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself out of those values.

  Ralph Ellison

  Relationship, Cousin, People

  Time Magazine, March 27, 1964.

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• 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

  Philosophy, Details, Alive

  Ralph Ellison (2011). “The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison: Revised and Updated”, p.129, Modern Library

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• 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

  Music, Art, Failing

  Ralph Ellison (2003). “The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison”, Random House LLC

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• The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.

  Ralph Ellison

  Things To Do, Exploits

  Ralph Ellison, Maryemma Graham, Amritjit Singh (1995). “Conversations with Ralph Ellison”, p.67, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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

  Ralph Ellison

  Men, Eagles, Purple

  Ralph Ellison (2010). “Invisible Man”, p.152, Vintage

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• Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?

  Ralph Ellison

  Speak, Knows, Frequency

  Invisible Man epilogue (1952)

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• Our task, then always, is to challenge the apparent forms of reality-that is, the fixed manner and values of the few, and to struggle with it until it reveals its mad, vari-implicated chaos, its false face, and so on until it surrenders its insight, its truth.

  Ralph Ellison

  Struggle, Reality, Mad

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• I am one of the most irresponsible beings that ever lived. Irresponsibility is part of my invisibility; any way you face it, it is a denial. But to whom can I be responsible, and why should I be, when you refuse to see me?

  Ralph Ellison

  Denial, Invisibility, Way

  Ralph Ellison (2010). “Invisible Man”, p.39, Vintage

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• It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself.

  Ralph Ellison

  Being Yourself, Self Esteem, Expectations

  Ralph Ellison (2010). “Invisible Man”, p.40, Vintage

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• 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

  Winter, Ice, Melting

  Ralph Ellison (2010). “Invisible Man”, p.271, Vintage

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• 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 it all, I find that I love.

  Ralph Ellison

  Hurt, Pain, Invisibility

  Ralph Ellison (1952). “Invisible Man”

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• I suddenly recall the 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

  Laughter, Gay, Air

  Ralph Ellison (2010). “Invisible Man”, p.134, Vintage

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• Perhaps everyone loved someone; I didn't now, I couldn't give much thought to love; in order to travel far you had to be detached, and I had the long road back to the campus before me.

  Ralph Ellison

  Travel, Order, Long

  Ralph Ellison (2010). “Invisible Man”, p.199, Vintage

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• Life is as the sea, art a ship in which man conquers life's crushing formlessness, reducing it to a course, a series of swells, tides and wind currents inscribed on a chart.

  Ralph Ellison

  Crush, Art, Men

  Ralph Ellison (2011). “The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison: Revised and Updated”, p.133, Modern Library

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

  Ralph Ellison

  Trying, Sirens, Empty

  Ralph Ellison (2010). “Invisible Man”, p.328, Vintage

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• That which we remember is, more often than not, that which we would like to have been; or that which we hope to be. Thus our memory and our identity are ever at odds; our history ever a tale told by inattentive idealists.

  Ralph Ellison

  Memories, Odds, Identity

  Ralph Ellison (2011). “The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison: Revised and Updated”, p.237, Modern Library

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• Everywhere I've turned somebody has wanted to sacrifice me for my own 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

  Sacrifice, Merry Go Round, Wanted

  Ralph Ellison (2010). “Invisible Man”, p.518, Vintage

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• 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

  Ornery, World, Wonderful

  Ralph Ellison (1994). “Invisible man”, Random House Inc

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• America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.

  Ralph Ellison

  America, Woven, Strands

  Invisible Man epilogue (1952)

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• For, like almost everyone else in our country, I started out with my share of optimism. I believed in hard work and progress and action, but now, after first being 'for' society and then 'against' it, I assign myself no rank or any limit, and such an attitude is very much against the trend of the times. But my world has become one of infinite possibilities. What a phrase - still it's a good phrase and a good view of life, and a man shouldn't accept any other; that much I've learned underground. Until some gang succeeds in putting the world in a strait jacket, its definition is possibility.

  Ralph Ellison

  Country, Attitude, Hard Work

  Ralph Ellison (1980). “Invisible man”, Vintage

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