237 Quotes by Ralph Ellison

Therefore he had either to affirm the transcendent ideals of democracy and his own dignity by aiding those who despised him, or accept his situation as hopelessly devoid of meaning; a choice tantamount to rejecting his own humanity.

Not only could you travel upward toward success but you could travel downward as well; up and down, in retreat as well as in advance, crabways and crossways and around in a circle, meeting your old selves coming and going and perhaps all at the same time.

Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination – indeed, everything and anything except me.

The world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.

After such knowledge, and given the persistence of racial violence and the unavailability of legal protection, I asked myself, what else was there to sustain our will to persevere but laughter?

I’ve illuminated the blackness of my invisibility – and vice versa.

All boundaries down, freedom was not only the recognition of necessity, it was the recognition of possibility.

Dammit, white folk are always giving orders, it’s a habit with them. Why didn’t you make an excuse? You’re black and living in the South – did you forget how to lie?

For history records the patterns of men’s lives, they say: Who slept with whom and with what results; who fought and who won and who lived to lie about it afterwards.