Ralph Ellison Quotes

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

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.

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

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

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

To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.

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

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

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

In order to travel far you have to be detached.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.

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

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

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?

I am nobody but myself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Education is all a matter of building bridges.

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