Quotes from Ralph Ellison

At best Americans give but a limited attention to history. Too much happens too rapidly, and before we can evaluate it, or exhaust its meaning or pleasure, there is something new to concern us. Ours is the tempo of the motion picture, not that of the still camera, and we waste experience as we wasted the forest.

Boo'ful, she said, life could be so diff'rent— But it never is, I said.

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.

To see around corners is enough (that is not unusual when you are invisible). But to hear around them is too much; it inhibits action.

For their most innocent words were acts of violence to which we of the campus were hypersensitive though we endured them not.

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.

We create the race by creating ourselves and then to our great astonishment we will have created something far more important: We will have created a culture. Why waste time creating a conscience for something that doesn't exist? For, you see, blood and skin do not think!

But live you must, and you can either make passive love to your sickness or burn it out and go on to the next conflicting phase.

New York! he said. That's not a place, it's a dream.

My hole is warm and full of light. Yes, full of light. I doubt if there is a brighter spot in all New York than this hole of mine, and I do not exclude Broadway. Or the Empire State Building on a photographer's dream night. But that is taking advantage of you. Those two spots are among the darkest of our whole civilization...which might sound like a hoax, or a contradiction, but that (by contradiction, I mean) is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.

Literature is integrated, and I'm not just talking about color or race. I'm talking about the power of literature to make us recognize - and again and again - the wholeness of the human experience.

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.

Do they come to bury the others or to be entombed to give life or to receive it?

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?

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.

To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.

Perhaps simple to be known, to be looked upon by so many people, to be the focal point of so many concentrating eyes, perhaps this was enough to make one different; enough to transform one into something else, someone else; just as by becoming and increasingly larger boy one became one day a man.

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

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.

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

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.

He's only a man. Remember that. He's only a man!

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

Now you're free of illusions,' Jack said, pointing to my seed wasting upon the air. 'How does it feel to be free of one's illusions?' And now I answered, 'Painful and empty... But look... there's your universe, and that drip-drop upon the water you hear is all the history you've made, all you're going to make