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 ELLISONAll novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?
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Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
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My hole is warm and full of light.
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I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
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Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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And while the ice was melting to form a flood in which I threatened to drown I awoke one afternoon to find that my first northern winter had set.
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Perhaps everyone loved someone; I didn’t now, I couldn’t give much thought to love; in order to travel far you had to be detached, and I had the long road back to the campus before me.
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It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.
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…and yet I am what they think I am.
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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.
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To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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What 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?
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