Quotes by Ralph Ellison

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

“I was no longer afraid. Not of important men, not of trustees and such; for knowing now that there was nothing which I could expect from them, there was no reason to be afraid.”

“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”

“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 ...”

“God is love, I said, but art's the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.”

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

“When I discover who I am, Ill be free.”

“a delegate shout out from the floor: Peonage, Anti-Lynch Bill, poll tax, these are our issues. They are the most controversial issues in American life, and some of us will have to die for them! Yes...”

“I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids --...”

“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.”

“It goes a long way back, some twenty years. All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they wer...”

“I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.”

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

“I could hardly get to sleep for dreaming of revenge.”

“I'd been so fascinated by the notion, that I'd forgotten to measure what it was bringing forth. I'd been asleep, dreaming.”

“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.”

“When we finally achieve the full right of participation in American life, what we make of it will depend upon our sense of cultural values, and our creative use of freedom, not upon our racial iden...”

“You're a Black educated fool, son. These white folk have newspapers, magazines, radios, spokesmen to get their ideas across. If they want to tell the world a lie, they can tell it so well that it b...”

“And while the ice was melting to form a flood in which I threatened to drown I awoke one afternoon to find that my first northern winter had set.”

“The moment I entered the bright, buzzing lobby of Mens House I was overcome by a sense of alienation and hostility The lobby was the meeting place for various groups still caught up in the illusio...”