And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone's way but my own. — Ralph Ellison Copy Share Image
I am one of the most irresponsible beings that ever lived. Irresponsibility is part of my invisibility; any way you face it,… — Ralph Ellison Copy Share Image
I felt that even when they were polite they hardly saw me, that they would have begged the pardon of Jack the… — Ralph Ellison Copy Share Image
If you can show me how I can cling to that which is real to me, while teaching me a way into… — 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
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
“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
