Ralph Ellison Quotes

Everywhere I've turned somebody has wanted to sacrifice me for my own good — only /they/ were the ones who benefited. And now we start on the old sacrificial merry-go-round. At what point do we stop?

Some things are just too unjust for words, and too ambiguous for either speech or ideas.

I knew that it was better to live out one’s own absurdity than to die for that of others.

They could laugh at him but they couldn't ignore him

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

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.

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 it all, I find that I love.

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

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

And sometimes the difference between individual and organized indignation is the difference between criminal and political action.

All it takes to get along in this here man's town is a little shit, grit, and mother-wit.

"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 — not even I. On the other hand, I've never been more loved and appreciated than when I tried to "justify" and affirm someone's mistaken beliefs; or when I've tried to give my friends the incorrect, absurd answers they wished to hear. In my presence they could talk and agree with themselves, the world was nailed down, and they loved it. They received a feeling of security. But here was the rub: Too often, in order to justify them, I had to take myself by the throat and choke myself until my eyes bulged and my tongue hung out and wagged like the door of an empty house in a high wind. Oh, yes, it made them happy and it made me sick. So I became ill of affirmation, of saying "yes" against the nay-saying of my stomach — not to mention my brain."

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

In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.

Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination — indeed, everything and anything except me.