Ralph Ellison on awake
“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.”
More Ralph Ellison quotes
Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself out of those values.
Ralph EllisonRalph 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 EllisonRalph 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 EllisonRalph Ellison Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
Ralph EllisonRalph Ellison Power, for the writer….lies in his ability to reveal if only a little bit more about the complexity of humanity.
Ralph EllisonRalph Ellison 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.
Ralph EllisonRalph Ellison 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.
Ralph EllisonRalph Ellison It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.
Ralph EllisonRalph Ellison And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own.
Ralph EllisonRalph Ellison Words are your business, boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock, the answer to the question.
Ralph EllisonRalph Ellison Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.
Ralph EllisonRalph Ellison Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
Ralph EllisonRalph Ellison It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
Ralph EllisonRalph Ellison All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority. The universal in the novel-and isn’t that what we’re all clamoring for these days?-is reached only through the depiction of the specific man in a specific circumstance.
Ralph EllisonRalph Ellison Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
Ralph EllisonRalph Ellison Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
Ralph EllisonRalph Ellison
