Quotes by Ralph Ellison

About Ralph Ellison:

Ralph Waldo Ellison is best known for his novel Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award in 1953. He also wrote Shadow and Act (1964), a collection of political, social and critical essays, and Going to the Territory (1986). A posthumous novel, Juneteenth, was published after being assembled from voluminous notes he left after his death.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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

The understanding of art depends finally upon one's willingness to extend one's humanity and one's knowledge of human life.

Ralph Ellison

When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.

Ralph Ellison

Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.

Ralph Ellison

I was no longer afraid. Not of important men, not of trustees and such; for knowing now that there was nothing which I could expect from them, there was no reason to be afraid.

Ralph Ellison

I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.

Ralph Ellison

I could hardly get to sleep for dreaming of revenge.

Ralph Ellison

Yes, they think we're dumb. They call us the "common people." But I've been sitting here listening and looking and trying to understand what's so common about us. I think they're guilty of a gross mis-statement of fact-we are the uncommon people-

Ralph Ellison

I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest. Or when, even as just now I've tried to articulate exactly what I felt to be the truth. No one was satisfied

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

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

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

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

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

Ralph Ellison

But what a feeling can come over a man just from seeing the things he believes in and hopes for symbolized in the concrete form of a man. In something that gives a focus to all the other things he knows to be real. Something that makes unseen things ...

Ralph Ellison

Words of Emancipation didn't arrive until the middle of June so they called it Juneteenth. his mind went on.

Ralph Ellison

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

Ralph Ellison

America is woven of many strands. I would recognise them and let it so remain. Our fate is to become one, and yet many. This is not prophecy, but description.

Ralph Ellison

I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.

Ralph Ellison

The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.

Ralph Ellison

Author Bio

  • NameRalph Ellison
  • DescriptionAmerican novelist, literary critic, scholar and writer
  • BornMarch 1, 1914
  • DiedApril 16, 1994
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionWriter; Essayist; Novelist; Autobiographer
  • WorksInvisible Man
  • AwardsNational Medal Of Arts; Presidential Medal Of Freedom; National Book Award