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“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.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“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 right open.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“How had I come to this? I had kept unswervingly to the path placed before me, had tried to be exactly what I was expected to be, had done exactly what I was expected to do -- yet, instead of winning the expected reward, here I was stumbling along, holding on desperately to one of my eyes in order to keep from bursting out my brain against some familiar object swerved into my path by my distorted vision. And now to drive me wild I felt suddenly that my grandfather was hovering over me, grinning triumphantly out of the dark. I simply could not endure it. For, despite my anguish and anger, I knew of no other way of living, nor other forms of success available to such as me. I was so completely a part of that existence that in the end I had to make my peace. It was either that or admit that my grandfather had made sense. Which was impossible, for though I still believed myself innocent, I saw that the only alternative to permanently facing the world of Trueblood and the Golden Day was to accept the responsibility for what had happened. Somehow, I convinced myself, I had violated the code and thus would have to submit to punishment. Dr. Bledsoe is right, I told myself, he's right; the school and what it stands for have to be protected. There was no other way, and no matter how much I suffered I would pay my debt as quickly as possible and return to building my career . . .”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Life is as the sea, art a ship in which man conquers life's crushing formlessness, reducing it to a course, a series of swells, tides and wind currents inscribed on a chart.”
― Ralph Ellison, Living with Music: Jazz Writings

“I recalled a report of a shoe-shine boy who had encountered the best treatment in the South simply by wearing a white turban instead of his usual Dobbs or Stetson, and I fell into a fit of laughing.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Well, few men love the truth or even regard facts so dearly as to let either one upset their picture of the world.”
― Ralph Ellison, Juneteenth

“Then too, you're constantly being bumped against by those of poor vision. Or again, you doubt if you really exist. You wonder whether you aren't simply a phantom in other people's minds. Say, a figure in a nightmare which the sleeper tries with all his strength to destroy.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“All our work had been very little, no great change had been made. And it was all my fault. I’d been so fascinated by the motion that I’d forgotten to measure what it was bringing forth. I’d been asleep, dreaming.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Play the game, but don’t believe in it—that much you owe yourself.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“I shivered in the hot street.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“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.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“I was naïve. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in the face of certain defeat”
― Ralph Ellison

“Perhaps, like them, I was a throwback, a small distant meteorite that died several hundred years ago and now lived only by virtue of the light that speeds through space at too great a pace to realize that its source has become a piece of lead”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“landed against a man who looked up with the anonymous familiarity of a drunk and shoved me hard away.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“So it is that now I denounce and defend, or feel prepared to defend. I condemn and affirm, say no and say yes, say yes and say no. I denounce because though implicated and partially responsible, I have been hurt to the point of abysmal pain, hurt to the point of invisibility. And I defend because in spite of all I find that I love. In order to get some of it down I have to love. I sell you no phony forgiveness, I'm a desperate man�� but too much of your life will be lost, its meaning lost, unless you approach it as much through love as through hate. So I approach it through division. So I denounce and I defend and I hate and I love.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisble Man

“under all of this black and white mess that in their ignorance some folks accept it as a natural condition. But then again, maybe they just feel that the whole earth would blow up if even a handful of folks got to digging into it. It would even seem a shame to expose it, to have it known that so much has been built on top of such a shaky foundation.”
― Ralph Ellison, Juneteenth

“You were trained to accept the foolishness of such old men as this, even when you thought them clowns and fools; you were trained to pretend that you respected them and acknowledged in them the same quality of authority and power in your world as the whites before whom they bowed and scraped and feared and loved and imitated, and you were even trained to accept it when, angered or spiteful, or drunk with power, they came at you with a stick or a strap or cane and you made no effort to strike back, but only to escape unmarked. But this was too much…he was not grandfather or uncle or father, nor preacher or teacher.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“they could talk and agree with themselves, the world was nailed down, and they loved it. They received a feeling of security.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“In this country men can be born and live well and die without ever having to feel much of what makes their ease possible, just because so much is buried”
― Ralph Ellison, Juneteenth

“When one is invisible he finds such problems as good and evil, honesty and dishonesty, of such shifting shapes that he confuses one with the other, depending upon who happens to be looking through him at the time.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“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.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“you ought to know better’n me that they respect some things of ours. Or at least they leave them alone. Maybe not our women or our right to good food and education, but they respect our burying grounds.”
― Ralph Ellison, Juneteenth

“Then the orchestra played excerpts from Dvořák's New World Symphony and I kept hearing "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" resounding through its dominant theme--my mother's and grandfather's favorite spiritual. It was more than I could stand, and before the next speaker could begin I hurried past the disapproving eyes of teachers and matrons, out into the night.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Our job is not to ask them what they think but to tell them”
― Ralph Ellison

“I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest. Or when, even as just now I've tried to articulate exactly what I felt to be the truth. No one was satisfied, not even I. I've never been more loved than when I tried to 'justify' and affirm someone's mistaken beliefs.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisble Man

“Deep at the dark bottom of the melting pot, where the private is public and the public private, where black is white and white black, where the immoral becomes moral and the moral is anything that makes one feel good (or that one has the power to sustain), the white man's relish is apt to be the black man's gall.”
― Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act

“Do you still call it ‘Juneteenth,�� Revern�� Hickman? Is it still celebrated?”
― Ralph Ellison, Juneteenth

“I hope so," I said
"Don't hope, make it that way”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisble Man

“Hell, he never had any doubts about his humanity -- that was left to his "free" offspring.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man