Quotes from 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 hoax, or a contradiction, but that (by contradiction, I mean) is how the world moves: not like an arrow, but a boomerang. (Beware of those who speak of the spiral of history; they are preparing a boomerang. Keep a steel helmet handy.)

Poor stumblers, neither of you can see the other. To you he is a mark on the scorecard of your achievement, a thing and not a man; a child, or even less--a black amorphous thing. And you, for all your power, are not a man to him, but a God, a force--

Tell them to teach them that when they call you nigger to make a rhyme with trigger it makes the gun backfire

Running from the birds to what, I didn't know. I ran. Why was I here at all? I ran through the night, ran within myself. Ran.

Boy on a Train From

He only wanted to use me for something. Everyone wanted to use you for some purpose.

Something in Mama's voice was vast and high, like a rainbow; yet something sad and deep, like when the organ played in church, was around Mama's words.

When I discover who I am, I'll be free." ? Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

An illusion was creating a counter-illusion. Where would it end? Did they believe their own propaganda? Afterwards

During these times of indecision when all the old answers are proven false, the people look back to the dead to give them a clue, they call first upon one and then upon another of those who have acted in the past.

Ah, I can hear you say, so it was all a build-up to bore us with his buggy jiving. He only wanted us to listen to him rave! But only partially true: 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?

Now, aware of my invisibility, I live rent-free in a building rented strictly to whites, in a section of the basement that was shut off and forgotten during the nineteenth century, which I discovered when I was trying to escape in the night from Ras the Destroyer. But that's getting too far ahead of the story, almost to the end, although the end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.

My emotions locked, as I saw her lipstick lying on the table and grabbed it, saying, Yes, yes, as I bent to write furiously across her belly in drunken inspiration: SYBIL, YOU WERE RAPED BY SANTA CLAUS SURPRISE and paused there; trembling above her, my knees on the bed as she waited with unsteady expectancy. It was purplish metallic shade of lipstick, and as she panted with anticipation the letters stretched and quivered, up hill and down dale, and she was lit up like a luminescent sign.

Ride 'em, cowboy. Give 'em hell and bananas.

Until some gang succeeds in putting the world in a strait jacket, its definition is possibility.

Don't you know the quickest way to die is to retire?

The work of art is, after all, an act of faith in our ability to communicate symbolically.

When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.

Shouldn't the short man have the right to make a mistake without his motives being considered consciously or unconsciously malicious?

As the advertising industry, which is dedicated to the creation of masks, makes clear, that which cannot gain authority from tradition may borrow it with a mask.

Power doesn't have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it.

I yam what I yam!

I've never been more loved and appreciated than when I tried to "justify" and affirm someone's mistaken beliefs; or when I've tried to give my friends the incorrect, absurd answers they wished to hear.

Don't come early in the morning Neither in the heat of the day But come in the sweet cool of the Evening and wash my sins away