237 Quotes by Ralph Ellison

Some things are just too unjust for words, and too ambiguous for either speech or ideas.

I felt that even when they were polite they hardly saw me, that they would have begged the pardon of Jack the Bear, never glancing his way if the bear happened to be walking along minding his business. It was confusing. I did not know if it was desirable or undesirable...

They were very much the same, each attempting to force his picture of reality upon me and neither giving a hoot in hell for how things looked to me.

But at the same time I was puzzled: How could anyone’s fate be pleasant? I had always thought of it as something painful. No one I knew spoke of it as pleasant – not even Woodridge, who made us read Greek plays.

Responsibility rests upon recognition, and recognition is a form of agreement.

But on the other hand, it would be a great mistake to assume that the dead are absolutely powerless.

Dr. Gordon S. Seagrave, the famous “Burma Surgeon.

On his deathbed he called my father to him and said, “Son, after I’m gone I want you to keep up the good fight. I never told you, but our life is a war and I have been a traitor all my born days, a spy in the enemy’s country ever since I give up my gun back in the Reconstruction. Live with your head in the lion’s mouth. I want you to overcome ‘em with yeses, undermine ‘em with grins, agree ’em to death and destruction, let ’em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open.

Until some gang succeeds in putting the world in a strait jacket, its definition is possibility.