237 Quotes by Ralph Ellison

It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.

Having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge.

I suddenly recall the arpeggios of laughter lilting across the tender, springtime grass-gay-welling, far-floating, fluent, spontaneous, a bell-like feminine fluting, then suppressed; as though snuffed swiftly and irrevocably beneath the quiet solemnity of the vespered air now vibrant with somber chapel bells.

In order to travel far you have to be detached.

Man's hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.

Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.

And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone's way but my own.

The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.

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.