Writer Quotes by Ralph Ellison

“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

“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

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

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

Power, for the writer…lies in his ability to reveal if only a little bit more about the complexity of humanity.

— Ralph Ellison

...and yet I am what they think I am.

— Ralph Ellison

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

“Do they come to bury the others or to be entombed to give life or to receive it?”

— Ralph Ellison

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

— Ralph Ellison

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

“All dreamers and sleepwalkers must pay the price, and even the invisible victim is responsible for the fate of all.”

— Ralph Ellison

“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

“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

And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone's way but my own.

— Ralph Ellison

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