Quotes from Ralph Ellison

Education is all a matter of building bridges.

Words are your business, boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock, the answer to the question.

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 the old sacrificial merry-go-round. At what point do we stop?

Some things are just too unjust for words, and too ambiguous for either speech or ideas.

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

The truth is the light and the light is the truth.

I knew that it was better to live out one's own absurdity than to die for that of others.

Perhaps everyone loved someone; I didn't now, I couldn't give much thought to love; in order to travel far you had to be detached, and I had the long road back to the campus before me.

I denounce because though implicated and partially responsible, I have been hurt to the point of abysmal pain, hurt to the point of invisibility. And I defend because in spite of it all, I find that I love.

Man's hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.

And sometimes the difference between individual and organized indignation is the difference between criminal and political action.

All it takes to get along in this here man's town is a little shit, grit, and mother-wit.

But we are all human, I thought, wondering what I meant.

If only all the contradictory voices shouting inside my head would calm down and sing a song in unison, whatever it was I wouldn't care as long as they sang without dissonance.

In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.

Words of Emancipation didn't arrive until the middle of June so they called it Juneteenth. So that was it, the night of Juneteenth celebration, his mind went on. The celebration of a gaudy illusion.

Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me.

God is love, I said, but art's the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.

I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.

They can laugh, but they can't deny us. They can curse and kill us, but they can't destroy us. This land is ours because we come out of it, we bled in it, our tears watered it, we fertilized it with our dead. So the more of us they destroy, the more it becomes filled with the spirit of our redemption.

It was unbelievable, but perhaps only the unbelievable could be believed. Perhaps the truth was always a lie.

It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself.

There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.

But what a feeling can come over a man just from seeing the things he believes in and hopes for symbolized in the concrete form of a man. In something that gives a focus to all the other things he knows to be real. Something that makes unseen things manifest and allows him to come to his hopes and dreams through his outer eye and through the touch and feel of his natural hand.