I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one… — 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
Man's hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove. — Ralph Ellison Copy Share Image
All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority. The universal in the novel-and isn't that what we're all clamoring… — Ralph Ellison Copy Share Image
“But what a feeling can come over a man just from seeing the things he believes in and hopes for symbolized in… — Ralph Ellison Copy Share Image
For, like almost everyone else in our country, I started out with my share of optimism. I believed in hard work and… — Ralph Ellison Copy Share Image
The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstance whether created by others or by… — Ralph Ellison Copy Share Image
Whence all this passion towards conformity anyway? Diversity is the word. Let man keep his many parts and you will have no… — Ralph Ellison Copy Share Image
I was pulled this way and that for longer than I can remember. And my problem was that I always tried to… — Ralph Ellison Copy Share Image
I am an invisible man. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids - and I might… — 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
“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 Image
“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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
“Do they come to bury the others or to be entombed to give life or to receive it?” — Ralph Ellison Copy Share Image
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 Image
“All dreamers and sleepwalkers must pay the price, and even the invisible victim is responsible for the fate of all.” — Ralph Ellison Copy Share Image
“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 Image
