Ralph Ellison Quotes

I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest. Or when, even as just now I’ve tried to articulate exactly what I felt to be the truth. No one was satisfied

And the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived. That goes for societies as well as for individuals.

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.

The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.

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

And I knew that it was better to live out one’s absurdity than to die for that of others.

The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.

The world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.

If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?

I feel the need to reaffirm all of it, the whole unhappy territory and all the things loved and unloveable in it, for it is all part of me.