Top 180 Ralph Ellison Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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 a circus sideshow, 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

102. “I had no doubt that I could do something, but what, and how? I had no contacts and I believed in nothing. And the obsession with my identity which I had developed in the factory hospital returned with a vengeance. Who was I, how had I come to be?”

— Ralph Ellison

103. “You start Saul, and end up Paul,′ my grandfather had often said. ‘When you’re a youngun, you Saul, but let life whup your head a bit and you starts to trying to be Paul – though you still Sauls around on the side.”

— Ralph Ellison

104. “Let man keep his many parts and you’ll have no tyrant states.”

— Ralph Ellison

105. “Whence all this passion toward conformity anyway? – diversity is the word. Let man keep his many parts and you’ll have no tyrant states.”

— Ralph Ellison

106. “And I knew that it was better to live out one’s absurdity than to die for that of others.”

— Ralph Ellison

107. “I ran away into the dark, laughing so hard I feared I might rupture myself.”

— Ralph Ellison

108. “I felt that even when they were polite they hardly saw me, that they would have begged the pardon of Jack the Bear, never glancing his way if the bear happened to be walking along minding his business. It was confusing. I did not know if it was desirable or undesirable...”

— Ralph Ellison

109. “Still it was nothing new, white folks seemed always to expect you to know those things which they’d done everything they could think of to prevent you from knowing.”

— Ralph Ellison

110. “And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own. I have also been called one thing and then another while no one really wished to hear what I called myself.”

— Ralph Ellison

111. “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

112. “Our fate is to become one, and yet many – This is not prophecy, but description.”

— Ralph Ellison

113. “All boundaries down, freedom was not only the recognition of necessity, it was the recognition of possibility.”

— Ralph Ellison

114. “Would you like to resurrect God to take responsibility?” He shook his head. “No, Brother, we have to make such decisions ourselves.”

— Ralph Ellison

115. “What is wrong with this gentleman, Sylvester?’ the tall one said. ‘A man’s dying outside!’ I said. ‘Someone is always dying,’ the other one said. ‘Yes, and it’s good to die beneath God’s great tent of sky.”

— Ralph Ellison

116. “Dammit, white folk are always giving orders, it’s a habit with them. Why didn’t you make an excuse? You’re black and living in the South – did you forget how to lie?”

— Ralph Ellison

117. “Who am I? But it was like trying to identify one particular cell that coursed through the torpid veins of my body. Maybe I was just this blackness and bewilderment and pain, but that seemed less like a suitable answer than something I’d read somewhere.”

— Ralph Ellison

118. “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

119. “The unheard sounds came through, and each melodic line existed of itself, stood out clearly from all the rest, said its piece, and waited patiently for the other voices to speak.”

— Ralph Ellison

120. “Thus despite the bland assertions of sociologists, “high visibility” actually rendered one un -visible – whether at high noon in Macy’s window or illuminated by flaming torches and flashbulbs while undergoing the ritual sacrifice that was dedicated to the ideal of white supremacy. After such knowledge, and given the persistence of racial violence and the unavailability of legal protection, I asked myself, what else was there to sustain our will to persevere but laughter?”

— Ralph Ellison

121. “I feel the need to reaffirm all of it, the whole unhappy territory and all the things loved and unloveable in it, for it is all part of me.”

— Ralph Ellison

122. “Too often, in order to justify them, I had to take myself by the throat and choke myself until my eyes bulged and my tongue hung out and wagged like the door of an empty house in a high wind. Oh, yes, it made them happy and it made me sick. So I became ill of affirmation, of saying “yes” against the nay-saying of my stomach – not to mention my brain.”

— Ralph Ellison

123. “The work of art is, after all, an act of faith in our ability to communicate symbolically.”

— Ralph Ellison

124. “His name was Clifton and he was black and they shot him. Isn’t that enough to tell? Isn’t it all you need to know?”

— Ralph Ellison

125. “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? And wait until I reveal how truly irresponsible I am. Responsibility rests upon recognition, and recognition is a form of agreement.”

— Ralph Ellison

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

— Ralph Ellison

127. “Which suggested to me that a novel could be fashioned as a raft of hope, perception and entertainment that might help keep us afloat as we tried to negotiate the snags and whirlpools that mark our nation’s vacillating course toward and away from the democratic ideal.”

— Ralph Ellison

128. “When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.”

— Ralph Ellison

129. “Even the church has to have its outhouse, just as it has to have a front door as well as a back door, a basement as well as a steeple. Because man is always going to be man...”

— Ralph Ellison

130. “There must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientists, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale.”

— Ralph Ellison

131. “But on the other hand, it would be a great mistake to assume that the dead are absolutely powerless.”

— Ralph Ellison

132. “He only wanted to use me for something. Everyone wanted to use you for some purpose.”

— Ralph Ellison

133. “For history records the patterns of men’s lives, they say: Who slept with whom and with what results; who fought and who won and who lived to lie about it afterwards.”

— Ralph Ellison

134. “I suspect that all the agony that goes into writing is borne precisely because the writer longs for acceptance-but it must be acceptance on his own terms.”

— Ralph Ellison

135. “Having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge.”

— Ralph Ellison

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

— Ralph Ellison

137. “Well, few men love the truth or even regard facts so dearly as to let either one upset their picture of the world. Poor Galileo, poor John Jasper; they persecuted one and laughed at the other, but both were witnesses for the truth they professed.”

— Ralph Ellison

138. “I was to be a justifier, my task would be to deny the unpredictable human element of all Harlem so that they could ignore it when it in any way interfered with their plans.”

— Ralph Ellison

139. “I can hear you say, “What a horrible, irresponsible bastard!” And you’re right. I leap to agree with you. 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? And wait until I reveal how truly irresponsible I am. Responsibility rests upon recognition, and recognition is a form of agreement.”

— Ralph Ellison

140. “Until some gang succeeds in putting the world in a strait jacket, its definition is possibility.”

— Ralph Ellison

141. “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 all I find that I love. In order to get some of it down I have to love... too much of your life will be lost, its meaning lost, unless you approach it as much through love as through hate.”

— Ralph Ellison

142. “Ride ’em, cowboy. Give ’em hell and bananas.”

— Ralph Ellison

143. “I passed on to a window decorated with switches of wiry false hair, ointments guaranteed to produce the miracle of whitening black skin. “You too can be truly beautiful,” a sign proclaimed. “Win greater happiness with whiter complexion. Be outstanding in your social set.”

— Ralph Ellison

144. “I blundered into writing.”

— Ralph Ellison

145. “Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.”

— Ralph Ellison

146. “So still and silent that they clash with the crowd in their very immobility; standing noisy in their silence; harsh as a cry of terror in their quietness.”

— Ralph Ellison

147. “The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.”

— Ralph Ellison

148. “By and large, the critics and readers gave me an affirmed sense of my identity as a writer. You might know this within yourself, but to have it affirmed by others is of utmost importance. Writing is, after all, a form of communication.”

— Ralph Ellison

149. “Nine owls have squawked out the rules and the hawks will talk, so soon they’ll come marching out of the woodpile and the woodwork – sore-head, sore-foot, right up close, one-butt-shuffling into history but demanding praise and kind treatment for deeds undone, for lessons unlearned. But studying war once more...”

— Ralph Ellison

150. “I had accepted the accepted attitudes and it had made life seem simple. But not anymore.”

— Ralph Ellison