237 Quotes by Ralph Ellison

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

Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are. That must be it, I thought – to lose your direction is to lose your face.

I had accepted the accepted attitudes and it had made life seem simple. But not anymore.

As Brother Jack had said, History makes harsh demands of us all. But they were demands that had to be met if men were to be the masters and not the victims of their times. Did I believe that? Perhaps I had already begun to pay.

Without light I am not only invisible, but formless as well; and to be unaware of one’s form is to live a death.

We don’t all dig Shakespeare uniformly, or even ‘Little Red Riding Hood.’ The understanding of art depends finally upon one’s willingness to extend one’s humanity and one’s knowledge of human life.

I passed on to a window decorated with switches of wiry false hair, ointments guaranteed to produce the miracle of whitening black skin. “You too can be truly beautiful,” a sign proclaimed. “Win greater happiness with whiter complexion. Be outstanding in your social set.

The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.

Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’