Quotes from Ralph Ellison

Hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.

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

That ... is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.

There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.

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.

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

I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed.

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

If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to blind, imprison, and destroy.

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.

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

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

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

Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.

The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.

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.

In order to travel far you have to be detached.

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.

Maybe it's just that some of us have had certain facts and truths slapped up against our heads so hard and so often that we have to see them and pay our respects to their reality.

So now they're shaking in their boots and looking for someone to give them the answer they want to hear. Not the truth, but some lie that will protect them from the truth

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.

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.

Man's hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.

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