Ralph Ellison Quotes

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

Words of Emancipation didn't arrive until the middle of June so they called it Juneteenth. So that was it, the night of Juneteenth celebration, his mind went on. The celebration of a gaudy illusion.

You start Saul, and end up Paul,' my grandfather had often said. 'When you're a youngun, you Saul, but let life whup your head a bit and you starts to trying to be Paul – though you still Sauls around on the side.

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

I denounce because though implicated and partially responsible, I have been hurt to the point of abysmal pain, hurt to the point of invisibility. And I defend because in spite of all I find that I love. In order to get some of it down I have to love. I sell you no phony forgiveness, I'm a desperate man—but too much of your life will be lost, its meaning lost, unless you approach it as much through love as through hate. So I approach it through division. So I denounce and I defend and I hate and I love.

So now they're shaking in their boots and looking for someone to give them the answer they want to hear. Not the truth, but some lie that will protect them from the truth

The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.

Play the game, but don’t believe in it – that much you owe yourself … Play the game, but raise the ante, my boy. Learn how it operates, learn how you operate.

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

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

Man's hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.

But we are all human, I thought, wondering what I meant.

Live with your head in the lion’s mouth.

Closed societies are now the flimsiest of illusions, for all the outsiders are demanding in.

Be your own father, young man