Quotes from Ralph Ellison

He's invisible, a walking personification of the Negative, the most perfect achievement of your dreams, sir! The mechanical man!

And he'll learn that his index and second fingers are meant for something other than playing the game of stink-finger and pulling his bow.

Shouldn't there be some way for us to be asked to sing? Shouldn't the short man have the right to make a mistake without his motives being considered consciously or unconsciously malicious?

that there are many men in his image while he is himself unseen;

landed against a man who looked up with the anonymous familiarity of a drunk and shoved me hard away.

H}istory 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. All things, it is said, are duly recorded--all things of importance, that is. But not quite, for actually it is only the known, the seen, the heard and only those events that the recorder regards as important that are set down, those lies his keepers keep their power by.

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.

with the combatants being the same people, civil wars are never really won; and because their most devastating engagements are fought within the individual human heart.

you ought to know better'n me that they respect some things of ours. Or at least they leave them alone. Maybe not our women or our right to good food and education, but they respect our burying grounds.

Do you still call it 'Juneteenth,' Revern' Hickman? Is it still celebrated?

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.

While one can do nothing about choosing one's relatives one can, as artist, choose one's "ancestors."

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.

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

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?

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

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

I am an invisible man. No I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allen Poe: Nor am I one of your Hollywood movie ectoplasms. 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, simply because people refuse to see me.

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

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

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.

And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone's way but my own.

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.

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