Quotes from Ralph Ellison

Our job is not to ask them what they think but to tell them

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 combatants being the same people, civil wars are never really won; and because their most devastating engagements are fought within the individual human heart.

Live with your head in the lion's mouth. I want you to overcome 'em with yeses, undermine 'em with grins, agree 'em to death and destruction, let 'em swoller you till they vomit or bust right open.

Why do you laugh?" he said. "Because at a price I now see that which I couldn't see," I said.

I'm an invisible man and it placed me in a hole—or showed me the hole I was in, if you will—and I reluctantly accepted the fact.

When one is invisible he finds such problems as good and evil, honesty and dishonesty, of such shifting shapes that he confuses one with the other, depending upon who happens to be looking through him at the time.

Play the game, but don't believe in it—that much you owe yourself.

they could talk and agree with themselves, the world was nailed down, and they loved it. They received a feeling of security.

popular, were combined with the special virtues of some local bootlegger, the eloquence of some Negro preacher, the strength and grace of some local athlete, the ruthlessness of some businessman-physician, the elegance in dress and manners of some head-waiter or hotel doorman.

I want you to overcome 'em with yeses, undermine 'em with grins, agree 'em to death and destruction, let 'em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open.

These white folk have newspapers, magazines, radios, spokesmen to get their ideas across. If they want to tell the world a lie, they can tell it so well that it becomes the truth;

You're nobody, son. You don't exist—can't you see that?

For man without myth is Othello with Desdemona gone: chaos descends, faith vanishes and superstitions prowl in the mind.

But at the same time I was puzzled: How could anyone's fate be pleasant? I had always thought of it as something painful. No one I knew spoke of it as pleasant—not even Woodridge, who made us read Greek plays.

It was exhausting, for no matter what the scheme I conceived, there was one constant flaw—myself. There was no getting around it. I could no more escape than I could think of my identity. Perhaps, I thought, the two things are involved with each other. When I discover who I am, I'll be free.

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; yes, and avoided the uncertain extremes of the scale.

If It's Optic White, It's the Right White

Being invisible and without substance, a disembodied voice, as it were, what else could I do? What else but try to tell you what was really happening when your eyes were looking through? And it is this which frightens me: Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?

H}istory records the patterns of men's lives, they say: Who slept with whom and with what results; who fought and who and who lived to lie about it afterwards. All things, it is said, are duly recorded--all things of importance, that is. But not quite, for actually it is only the known, the seen, the heard and only those events that the recorder regards as important that are set down, those lies his keepers keep their power by. -- Ralph Ellison, in Invisible Man

That which we do is what we are. That which we remember is, more often than not, that which we would like to have been; or that which we hope to be. Thus our memory and our identity are ever at odds; our history ever a tall tale told by inattentive idealists.

My name is Peter Wheatstraw, I'm the Devil's only son-in-law

you often doubt if you really exist. You wonder whether you aren't simple a phantom in other people's minds. Say, a figure in a nightmare which the sleeper tries with all his strength to destroy… You ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world, that you're a part of all the sound and anguish, and you strike out with your fists, you curse and you swear to make them recognize you. And, alas, it's seldom successful.

Perhaps, like them, I was a throwback, a small distant meteorite that died several hundred years ago and now lived only by virtue of the light that speeds through space at too great a pace to realize that its source has become a piece of lead

Well, few men love the truth or even regard facts so dearly as to let either one upset their picture of the world.