That ... is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang. — Ralph Ellison Copy Share Image
“Boo'ful," she said, "life could be so diff'rent—" "But it never is," I said.” — Ralph Ellison Copy Share Image
When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical. — Ralph Ellison Copy Share Image
The understanding of art depends finally upon one's willingness to extend one's humanity and one's knowledge of human life. — Ralph Ellison Copy Share Image
“Do they come to bury the others or to be entombed to give life or to receive it?” — Ralph Ellison Copy Share Image
Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat. — Ralph Ellison Copy Share Image
And the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was… — Ralph Ellison Copy Share Image
Life is as the sea, art a ship in which man conquers life's crushing formlessness, reducing it to a course, a series… — Ralph Ellison Copy Share Image
America is woven of many strands; I would recognize them and let it so remain. It's 'winner take nothing' that is the… — Ralph Ellison Copy Share Image
I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it… — Ralph Ellison Copy Share Image
All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I… — Ralph Ellison Copy Share Image
“Such was the short bitter life of Brother Tod Clifton. Now he's in this box with the bolts tightened down. He's in… — Ralph Ellison Copy Share Image
It goes a long way back, some twenty years. All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned… — Ralph Ellison Copy Share Image
“When we finally achieve the full right of participation in American life, what we make of it will depend upon our sense… — Ralph Ellison Copy Share Image
“Civil wars...are the best wars for the writer...because they have a way of continuing long afterwl wars between nations are resolved; because, with the… — Ralph Ellison Copy Share
“But what a feeling can come over a man just from seeing the things he believes in and hopes for symbolized in the concrete… — Ralph Ellison Copy Share
I suspect that all the agony that goes into writing is borne precisely because the writer longs for acceptance-but it must be acceptance on… — Ralph Ellison Copy Share
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… — Ralph Ellison Copy Share
Power, for the writer…lies in his ability to reveal if only a little bit more about the complexity of humanity. — Ralph Ellison Copy Share
And while the ice was melting to form a flood in which I threatened to drown I awoke one afternoon to find that my… — Ralph Ellison Copy Share
“Do they come to bury the others or to be entombed to give life or to receive it?” — Ralph Ellison Copy Share
Commercial rock 'n' roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression. — Ralph Ellison Copy Share
“All dreamers and sleepwalkers must pay the price, and even the invisible victim is responsible for the fate of all.” — Ralph Ellison Copy Share
“Those two spots are among the darkest of our whole civilization--pardon me, our whole culture (an important distinction, I've heard)--which might sound like a… — Ralph Ellison Copy Share
“Above the decorous walking around me, sounds of footsteps leaving the verandas of far-flung buildings and moving toward the walks and over the walks… — Ralph Ellison Copy Share
And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone's way but my own. — Ralph Ellison Copy Share
I am one of the most irresponsible beings that ever lived. Irresponsibility is part of my invisibility; any way you face it, it is… — Ralph Ellison Copy Share
