Top 180 Ralph Ellison Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “An illusion was creating a counter-illusion. Where would it end? Did they believe their own propaganda? Afterwards.”

— Ralph Ellison

152. “We mean to do right by you, but you’ve got to know your place at all times.”

— Ralph Ellison

153. “Not only could you travel upward toward success but you could travel downward as well; up and down, in retreat as well as in advance, crabways and crossways and around in a circle, meeting your old selves coming and going and perhaps all at the same time.”

— Ralph Ellison

154. “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 manifest and allows him to come to his hopes and dreams through his outer eye and through the touch and feel of his natural hand.”

— Ralph Ellison

155. “He was a cop. A good citizen. But this cop had an itching finger and an eager ear for a word that rhymed with ‘trigger,’ and when Clifton fell he had found it. The Police Special spoke its lines and the rhyme was completed. Just look around you. Look at what he made, look inside you and feel his awful power. It was perfectly natural. The blood ran like blood in a comic-book killing, on a comic-book street in a comic-book town on a comic-book day in a comic-book world.”

— Ralph Ellison

156. “I recalled a report of a shoe-shine boy who had encountered the best treatment in the South simply by wearing a white turban instead of his usual Dobbs or Stetson, and I fell into a fit of laughing.”

— Ralph Ellison

157. “Toata viata am cautat ceva si, oriunde m-as fi indreptat, cineva incerca sa-mi spuna ce este acel ceva. Am acceptat raspunsurile fiecaruia, desi erau deseori contradictorii unele fata de altele sau chiar fata de ele insele. Am fost naiv. Ma cautam pe mine insumi si intrebam pe oricine, mai putin pe mine, intrebari la care eu, si numai eu, puteam gasi raspunsul.”

— Ralph Ellison

158. “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

159. “And let’s remember that science isn’t a game of chess, although chess may be played scientifically. The other thing to remember is that if we are to organize the masses we must first organize ourselves.”

— Ralph Ellison

160. “Something in Mama’s voice was vast and high, like a rainbow; yet something sad and deep, like when the organ played in church, was around Mama’s words.”

— Ralph Ellison

161. “Agree ’em to death and destruction,” grandfather had advised.”

— Ralph Ellison

162. “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

163. “For we select neither our parents, our race nor our nation; these occur to us out of the love, the hate, the circumstances, the fate, of others.”

— Ralph Ellison

164. “As the advertising industry, which is dedicated to the creation of masks, makes clear, that which cannot gain authority from tradition may borrow it with a mask.”

— Ralph Ellison

165. “Only men who are not only corrupt but whose corruption has frozen over and hardened can confess the things they do and still accept positions of leadership. They are dead men and unless they’re controlled by public opinion and every other available force, they’re as dangerous as Nazis. More so, because they still speak in the name of the only possible future. I.”

— Ralph Ellison

166. “Without light I am not only invisible, but formless as well; and to be unaware of one’s form is to live a death.”

— Ralph Ellison

167. “I yam what I yam!”

— Ralph Ellison

168. “As Brother Jack had said, History makes harsh demands of us all. But they were demands that had to be met if men were to be the masters and not the victims of their times. Did I believe that? Perhaps I had already begun to pay.”

— Ralph Ellison

169. “Come out of the fog, young man. And remember you don’t have to be a complete fool in order to succeed. Play the game, but don’t believe in it – that much you owe yourself. Even if it lands you in a strait jacket or a padded cell. 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 – I wish I had time to tell you only a fragment.”

— Ralph Ellison

170. “I pour the red liquid over the white mound, watching it glisten and the vapor rising as Louis bends that military instrument into a beam of lyrical sound.”

— Ralph Ellison

171. “Why, godamit, why did they insist upon confusing the class struggle with the ass struggle, debasing both us and them – all human motives?”

— Ralph Ellison

172. “I’ll teach you some good bad habits. You’ll need ’em.”

— Ralph Ellison

173. “You ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world, that you’re part of all the sound and anguish.”

— Ralph Ellison

174. “No, you could never tell where you were going, that was a sure thing. The only sure thing. Nor could you tell how you’d get there – though when you arrived it was somehow right.”

— Ralph Ellison

175. “What did I do To be so black And blue?”

— Ralph Ellison

176. “I’d had too many drinks. Time ran invisible, fluid, sad.”

— Ralph Ellison

177. “My God, boy! You’re black and living in the South – did you forget how to lie?”

— Ralph Ellison

178. “Don’t you know the quickest way to die is to retire?”

— Ralph Ellison

179. “Shouldn’t the short man have the right to make a mistake without his motives being considered consciously or unconsciously malicious?”

— Ralph Ellison

180. “Besides, I might as well admit right now, I thought, that there are many things about people like Mary that I dislike. For one thing, they seldom know where their personalities end and yours begins; they usually think in terms of “we” while I have always tended to think in terms of “me” – and that has caused some friction, even with my own family.”

— Ralph Ellison

181. “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

182. “I didn’t want to be trouble to anyone,” I said. “Everybody has to be trouble to somebody.”

— Ralph Ellison