I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
RALPH ELLISONLight confirms my reality, gives birth to my form…without light I am not only invisible but formless as well; and to be unaware of one’s form is to live a death…the truth is the light and light is the truth.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
-
-
I’m not a separatist. The imagination is integrative. That’s how you make the new — by putting something else with what you’ve got. And I’m unashamedly an American integrationist.
RALPH ELLISON -
The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
RALPH ELLISON -
I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
RALPH ELLISON -
I am one of the most irresponsible beings that ever lived. Irresponsibility is part of my invisibility; any way you face it, it is a denial. But to whom can I be responsible, and why should I be, when you refuse to see me?
RALPH ELLISON -
Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
RALPH ELLISON -
If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to bind, imprison and destroy.
RALPH ELLISON -
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.
RALPH ELLISON -
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.
RALPH ELLISON -
When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
RALPH ELLISON -
the 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 ELLISON -
In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
RALPH ELLISON -
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.
RALPH ELLISON -
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.
RALPH ELLISON -
Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
RALPH ELLISON -
Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
RALPH ELLISON