America is woven of many strands. I would recognise them and let it so remain. Our fate is to become one, and yet many. This is not prophecy, but description.
Ralph Ellison

By and large, the critics and readers gave me an affirmed sense of my identity as a writer. You might know this within yourself, but to have it affirmed by others is of utmost importance. Writing is, after all, a form of communication.
Ralph 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 Ellison

Education is all a matter of building bridges.
Ralph Ellison

Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
Ralph Ellison

Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
Ralph Ellison

Hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
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

I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
Ralph Ellison

I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed.
Ralph Ellison


If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to blind, imprison, and destroy.
Ralph Ellison

Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
Ralph Ellison

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 Ellison

The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
Ralph Ellison

The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
Ralph Ellison

The understanding of art depends finally upon one's willingness to extend one's humanity and one's knowledge of human life.
Ralph Ellison

There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
Ralph Ellison

There must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientists, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale.
Ralph Ellison

When I discover who I am, I'll be free.
Ralph Ellison