Top 180 Ralph Ellison Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Ralph Ellison

2. “When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.”

— Ralph Ellison

3. “I am an invisible man. 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.”

— Ralph Ellison

4. “It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.”

— Ralph Ellison

5. “If you can show me how I can cling to that which is real to me, while teaching me a way into the larger society, then and only then will I drop my defenses and hostility, and I will sing your praises and help you to make the desert bear fruit.”

— Ralph Ellison

6. “Imitation is suicide, envy is ignorance.”

— Ralph Ellison

7. “The truth is the light and the light is the truth.”

— Ralph Ellison

8. “I am nobody but myself.”

— Ralph Ellison

9. “Education is all a matter of building bridges.”

— Ralph Ellison

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

— Ralph Ellison

11. “Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.”

— Ralph Ellison

12. “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

13. “I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.”

— Ralph Ellison

14. “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.”

— Ralph Ellison

15. “Power doesn’t have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it.”

— Ralph Ellison

16. “In order to travel far you have to be detached.”

— Ralph Ellison

17. “All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority. The universal in the novel-and isn’t that what we’re all clamoring for these days?-is reached only through the depiction of the specific man in a specific circumstance.”

— Ralph Ellison

18. “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

19. “Play the game, but play it your own way – part of the time at least. Play the game, but raise the ante, my boy. Learn how it operates, learn how you operate.”

— Ralph Ellison

20. “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

21. “The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.”

— Ralph Ellison

22. “All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.”

— Ralph Ellison

23. “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

24. “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

25. “The world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.”

— Ralph Ellison

26. “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

27. “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?”

— Ralph Ellison

28. “New York!” he said. “That’s not a place, it’s a dream.”

— Ralph Ellison

29. “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

30. “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

31. “And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own.”

— Ralph Ellison

32. “We don’t all dig Shakespeare uniformly, or even ‘Little Red Riding Hood.’ The understanding of art depends finally upon one’s willingness to extend one’s humanity and one’s knowledge of human life.”

— Ralph Ellison

33. “To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.”

— Ralph Ellison

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

— Ralph Ellison

35. “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

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

— Ralph Ellison

37. “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

38. “Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled “file and forget,” and I can neither file nor forget.”

— Ralph Ellison

39. “Dr. Gordon S. Seagrave, the famous “Burma Surgeon.”

— Ralph Ellison

40. “But to whom can I be responsible, and why should I be, when you refuse to see me?”

— Ralph Ellison

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

— Ralph Ellison

42. “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

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

— Ralph Ellison

44. “In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.”

— Ralph Ellison

45. “If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to bind, imprison and destroy.”

— Ralph Ellison

46. “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

47. “I’m an invisible man and it placed me in a hole – or showed me the hole I was in, if you will – and I reluctantly accepted the fact.”

— Ralph Ellison

48. “Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.”

— Ralph Ellison

49. “I am standing puzzled, unable to decide whether the veil is really being lifted, or lowered more firmly in place; whether I am witnessing a revelation or a more efficient blinding.”

— Ralph Ellison

50. “Live with your head in the lion’s mouth.”

— Ralph Ellison