I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
RALPH ELLISONI am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
RALPH ELLISONWords are your business, boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock, the answer to the question.
RALPH ELLISONI do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
RALPH ELLISONThe end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
RALPH ELLISONWhat and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?
RALPH ELLISONEvery serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty.
RALPH ELLISONThere are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
RALPH ELLISONI am an invisible man. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids – and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
RALPH ELLISONThe blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstances, whether created by others or by one’s own human failing.
RALPH ELLISONThe thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
RALPH ELLISONThe clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.
RALPH ELLISONPlease, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
RALPH ELLISONthe world is just as concrete, ornery, vile, and sublimely wonderful as before, only now I better understand my relation to it and it to me.
RALPH ELLISONAnd my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own.
RALPH ELLISONTo hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
RALPH ELLISONGood fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
RALPH ELLISON