“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
“These white folk have newspapers, magazines, radios, spokesmen to get their ideas across. If they want to tell the world a lie,… — 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
“Nothing, storm or flood, must get in the way of our need for light and ever more and brighter light. The truth… — Ralph Ellison Copy Share Image
I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest. Or when, even as just now I've tried to articulate… — Ralph Ellison Copy Share Image
“It was unbelievable, but perhaps only the unbelievable could be believed. Perhaps the truth was always a lie.” — Ralph Ellison Copy Share Image
Light confirms my reality, gives birth to my form...without light I am not only invisible but formless as well; and to be… — 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
