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“Being invisible and without substance, a disembodied voice, as it were, what else could I do? What else but try to tell you what was really happening when your eyes were looking through? And it is this which frightens me: Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Ellison gave our age a new metaphor for social alienation. His definition of invisibility is so common now, so much a part of the culture and language—like a coin handled by millions—that it is automatically invoked when we talk about the situation of black Americans and any social group we willingly refuse to see.”
― Ralph Ellison, Juneteenth

“Look at me! Look at me!�� I said. “Everywhere I’ve turned somebody has wanted to sacrifice me for my good—only they were the ones who benefited. And now we start on the old sacrificial merry-go-round. At what point do we stop?”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Can I say in twenty minutes what was building twenty-one years and ended in twenty seconds?”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“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.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“that there are many men in his image while he is himself unseen;”
― Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act

“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.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“I only know the ache that I feel in my heart, my sense of loss. I don't know if you have a soul. I only know you are men of flesh and blood; and that blood will spill and flesh grow cold. I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers. And I know too how we are labeled. So in the name of Brother Clifton beware of the triggers; go home, keep cool, stay safe away from the sun. Forget him. When he was alive he was our hope, but why worry over a hope that's dead?”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“During these times of indecision when all the old answers are proven false, the people look back to the dead to give them a clue,”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Have I become one of those bores who talk too much about their children?”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“but nobody cares about their grievances," I said. "Suppose they were articulated, who would listen or care?"
"They exist," he said with his knowing smile. "They exist, and when the cry of protest is sounded, there are those who will hear it and act.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisble Man

“But not quite, for actually it is only the known, the seen, the heard and only those events that the recorder regards as important that are put down, those lies his keepers keep their power by.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“I’m an invisible man and it placed me in a hole—or showed me the hole I was in, if you will—and I reluctantly accepted the fact.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Was it that she understood that we resented having others think that we were all entertainers and natural singers? But now after the mutual laughter something disturbed me: Shouldn't there be some way for us to be asked to sing? Shouldn't the short man have the right to make a mistake without his motives being considered consciously or unconsciously malicious? After all, he was singing, or trying to. What if I asked him to sing?”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest.”
― Ralph Ellison

“Was this the only true history of the times, a mood blared by trumpets, trombones, saxophones and drums, a song with turgid, inadequate words? My mind flowed. It was as though in this short block I was forced to walk past everyone I’d ever known and no one would smile or call my name. No one fixed me in his eyes. I walked in feverish isolation.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Ellison stated that “by a trick of fate (and our racial problems notwithstanding), the human imagination is integrative—and the same is true of the centrifugal force that inspirits the democratic process.”
― Ralph Ellison, Juneteenth

“He's invisible, a walking personification of the Negative, the most perfect achievement of your dreams, sir! The mechanical man!”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“It was exhausting, for no matter what the scheme I conceived, there was one constant flaw—myself. There was no getting around it. I could no more escape than I could think of my identity. Perhaps, I thought, the two things are involved with each other. When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Well, I was and yet I was invisible, that was the fundamental contradiction. I was and yet I was unseen. It was frightening and as I sat there I sensed another frightening world of possibilities. For now I saw that I could agree with Jack without agreeing. And I could tell Harlem to have hope when there was no hope. Perhaps I could tell them to hope until I found the basis of something real, some firm ground for action that would lead them onto the plane of history. But until then I would have to move them without myself being moved.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“a dime pierced with a nail hole so as to be worn about the ankle on a string for luck,”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“All they wanted of me was one belch of affirmation and I’d bellow it out loud. Yes! Yes! YES! That was all anyone wanted of us, that we should be heard and not seen, and then heard only in one big optimistic chorus of yassuh, yassuh, yassuh!”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“...out of the counterfeiting of the black American's identity [in blackface minstrelsy] there arises a profound doubt in the white man's mind as to the authenticity of his own image of himself. He, after all, went into the business when he refused the king's shilling and revolted. He had put on a mask of his own, as it were...For the ex-colonials, the declaration of an American identity meant the assumption of a mask, and it imposed not only the discipline of national self-consciousness, it gave Americans an ironic awareness of the joke that always lies between appearance and reality, between the discontinuity of social tradition and that sense of the past which clings to the mind. And perhaps even an awareness of the joke that society is man's creation, not God's. Americans began their revolt from the English fatherland when they dumped the tea into Boston Harbor, masked as Indians, and the mobility of the society created in this limitless space has encouraged the use of the mask for good and evil ever since.”
― Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act

“Understand? It's worse than that. He registers with his senses but short-circuits his brain. Nothing has meaning. He takes it in but he doesn't digest it. Already he is . . . a walking zombie! Already he's learned to repress not only his emotions but his humanity. He's invisible, a walking personification of the Negative, the most perfect achievement of your dreams, sir! The mechanical man!”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“These people are old. Men grow old and types of men grow old. And these are very old. All they have left is their religion. That’s all they can think about. So they’ll be cast aside. They’re dead, you see, because they’re incapable of rising to the necessity of the historical situation.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was...I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“If only all the contradictory voices shouting inside 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; yes, and avoided the uncertain extremes of the scale.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“And that lie that success was a rising upward. What crummy lie they kept us dominated by. 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. How could I have missed it for so long? Hadn't I grown up around gambler-politicians, bootleggerjudges and sheriffs who were burglars; yes, and Klansmen who were preachers and members of
humanitarian societies. Hell, and hadn't Bledsoe tried to tell me what it was all about?”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Poor stumblers, neither of you can see the other. To you he is a mark on the scorecard of achievement, a thing and not a man; a child, or even less - a black amorphous thing. And you, for all your power, are not a man to him, but a God, a force -”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“I had switched from the arrogant absurdity of Norton and Emerson to that of Jack and the Brotherhood, and it all came out the same—except I now recognized my invisibility. So I’d accept it, I’d explore it, rine and heart. I’d”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man