Ralph Ellison Quotes, Thoughts and images

It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.

Education is all a matter of building bridges.

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

The world is a possibility if only you'll discover it.

I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.

Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled 'file and forget.'

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

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

I am nobody but myself.

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?

Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.

Power, for the writer lies in his ability to reveal if only a little bit more about the complexity of humanity.

The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.

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

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

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

Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.

The truth is the light and the light is the truth.

We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.

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

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

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

In order to travel far you have to be detached.

If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?

Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.

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

To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.

It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.

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

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

The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstances, whether created by others or by one's own human failing.

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