Ralph Ellison – Quotes

I am an invisible

I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. Ralph Ellison

I felt that even when they were polite they hardly saw me, that they would have begged the pardon of Jack the Bear, never glancing his way if the bear happened to be walking along minding his business. It was confusing. I did not know if it was desirable or undesirable. Ralph Ellison

Commercial rock ‘n’ roll

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 novels are about

All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority. Ralph Ellison

I suspect that all

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 his own terms. Ralph Ellison

My hole is warm

My hole is warm and full of light. Ralph Ellison

We don’t all dig

We don’t all dig Shakespeare uniformly, or even ‘Little Red Riding Hood.’ The understanding of art depends finally upon one’s willingness to extend one’s humanity and one’s knowledge of human life. Ralph Ellison

But what a feeling

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 … Read more

Many of the rites

Many of the rites of passage, those rituals of growing up found in our society, are in the form of such comic, practical joking affairs–which we ignore in the belief that they possess no deeper significance. Yet it is precisely in their being regarded as unimportant that they take on importance. For in them we … Read more

When American life is

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