That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
RALPH ELLISONPower, for the writer….lies in his ability to reveal if only a little bit more about the complexity of humanity.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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Every 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.
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I 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.
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I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
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Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
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Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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The world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.
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I remember that I’m invisible and walk softly so as not awake the sleeping ones. Sometimes it is best not to awaken them; there are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
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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.
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The 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.
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The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
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Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
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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.
RALPH ELLISON






