237 Quotes by Ralph Ellison

Even the church has to have its outhouse, just as it has to have a front door as well as a back door, a basement as well as a steeple. Because man is always going to be man...

Gin, jazz and dreams were not enough.

Nine owls have squawked out the rules and the hawks will talk, so soon they’ll come marching out of the woodpile and the woodwork – sore-head, sore-foot, right up close, one-butt-shuffling into history but demanding praise and kind treatment for deeds undone, for lessons unlearned. But studying war once more...

If only all the contradictory voices shouting in my head would calm down and sing a song in unison, whatever it was I wouldn’t care as long as they sang without dissonance.

And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own. I have also been called one thing and then another while no one really wished to hear what I called myself.

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.

New York!” he said. “That’s not a place, it’s a dream.

Without light I am not only invisible, but formless as well; and to be unaware of one’s form is to live a death. I myself, after existing some twenty years, did not become alive until I discovered my invisibility.

Ride ’em, cowboy. Give ’em hell and bananas.