Top 180 Ralph Ellison Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.”

— Ralph Ellison

52. “Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.”

— Ralph Ellison

53. “Some things are just too unjust for words, and too ambiguous for either speech or ideas.”

— Ralph Ellison

54. “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

55. “And sometimes the difference between individual and organized indignation is the difference between criminal and political action.”

— Ralph Ellison

56. “On his deathbed he called my father to him and said, “Son, after I’m gone I want you to keep up the good fight. I never told you, but our life is a war and I have been a traitor all my born days, a spy in the enemy’s country ever since I give up my gun back in the Reconstruction. Live with your head in the lion’s mouth. I want you to overcome ‘em with yeses, undermine ‘em with grins, agree ’em to death and destruction, let ’em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open.”

— Ralph Ellison

57. “That invisibility to which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come in contact. A matter of the construction of their INNER eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality.”

— Ralph Ellison

58. “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

59. “I remember that I’m invisible and walk softly so as not awake the sleeping ones. Sometimes it is best not to awaken them; there are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.”

— Ralph Ellison

60. “Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are. That must be it, I thought – to lose your direction is to lose your face.”

— Ralph Ellison

61. “They could laugh at him but they couldn’t ignore him.”

— Ralph Ellison

62. “Without light I am not only invisible, but formless as well; and to be unaware of one’s form is to live a death. I myself, after existing some twenty years, did not become alive until I discovered my invisibility.”

— Ralph Ellison

63. “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

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

— Ralph Ellison

65. “I’ve illuminated the blackness of my invisibility – and vice versa.”

— Ralph Ellison

66. “Well, you had better speak more slowly so we can understand. We mean to do right by you, but you’ve got to know your place at all times. All right, now, go on with your speech.”

— Ralph Ellison

67. “Then in my mind’s eye I see the bronze statue of the college Founder, the cold Father symbol, his hands outstretched in the breathtaking gesture of lifting a veil that flutters in hard, metallic folds above the face of a kneeling slave; and 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

68. “Running from the birds to what, I didn’t know. I ran. Why was I here at all? I ran through the night, ran within myself. Ran.”

— Ralph Ellison

69. “We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.”

— Ralph Ellison

70. “My hole is warm and full of light.”

— Ralph Ellison

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

— Ralph Ellison

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

73. “Boy on a Train From.”

— Ralph Ellison

74. “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

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

— Ralph Ellison

76. “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

77. “But at the same time I was puzzled: How could anyone’s fate be pleasant? I had always thought of it as something painful. No one I knew spoke of it as pleasant – not even Woodridge, who made us read Greek plays.”

— Ralph Ellison

78. “If only all the contradictory voices shouting in my head would calm down and sing a song in unison, whatever it was I wouldn’t care as long as they sang without dissonance.”

— Ralph Ellison

79. “There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.”

— Ralph Ellison

80. “It goes a long way back, some twenty years. All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naive. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. 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. But first I had to discover that I am an invisible man!”

— Ralph Ellison

81. “If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?”

— Ralph Ellison

82. “Gin, jazz and dreams were not enough.”

— Ralph Ellison

83. “Call me Jack-the-Bear, for I am in a state of hibernation.”

— Ralph Ellison

84. “What a group of people we were, I thought. Why, you could cause us the greatest humiliation simply by confronting us with something we liked.”

— Ralph Ellison

85. “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

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

— Ralph Ellison

87. “It was unbelievable, but perhaps only the unbelievable could be believed. Perhaps the truth was always a lie.”

— Ralph Ellison

88. “Don’t come early in the morning Neither in the heat of the day But come in the sweet cool of the Evening and wash my sins away.”

— Ralph Ellison

89. “You’re a Black educated fool, son. These white folk have newspapers, magazines, radios, spokesmen to get their ideas across. If they want to tell the world a lie, they can tell it so well that it becomes the truth; and if I tell them you’re lying, they’ll tell the world even if you prove you’re telling the truth. Because it’s the kind of lie they want to hear.”

— Ralph Ellison

90. “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

91. “Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’”

— Ralph Ellison

92. “And yet, it was a strangely satisfying experience for an invisible man to hear the silence of sound.”

— Ralph Ellison

93. “Now, aware of my invisibility, I live rent-free in a building rented strictly to whites, in a section of the basement that was shut off and forgotten during the nineteenth century, which I discovered when I was trying to escape in the night from Ras the Destroyer. But that’s getting too far ahead of the story, almost to the end, although the end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.”

— Ralph Ellison

94. “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

95. “Responsibility rests upon recognition, and recognition is a form of agreement.”

— Ralph Ellison

96. “Then too, you’re constantly being bumped against by those of poor vision. Or again, you doubt if you really exist. You wonder whether you aren’t simply a phantom in other people’s minds. Say, a figure in a nightmare which the sleeper tries with all his strength to destroy.”

— Ralph Ellison

97. “Therefore he had either to affirm the transcendent ideals of democracy and his own dignity by aiding those who despised him, or accept his situation as hopelessly devoid of meaning; a choice tantamount to rejecting his own humanity.”

— Ralph Ellison

98. “Now I know men are different and that all life is divided and that only in division is there true health.”

— Ralph Ellison

99. “I’ve never been more loved and appreciated than when I tried to “justify” and affirm someone’s mistaken beliefs; or when I’ve tried to give my friends the incorrect, absurd answers they wished to hear.”

— Ralph Ellison

100. “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