Quotes by Ralph Ellison

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

“Power doesnt have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it.”

“Education is all a matter of building bridges”

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

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstances, whether created by others or by ones own human failing.”

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

I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest. Or when, even as just now Ive 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 knows to be real. Something that makes unseen things manifest and allows him to come to his hopes and dreams through his outer eye and through the touch and feel of his natural hand.

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

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.

New York! he said. Thats not a place, its a dream.

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

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

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 were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naive. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. 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. But first I had to discover that I am an invisible man!

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