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“And the boy, this automaton, he was made of the very mud of the region and he sees far less than you. Poor stumblers, neither of you can see the other. To you he is a mark on the scorecard of your 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 forceâ€�”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“people face Death and even go a piece with him and then wrestle with him and get away, thank the Lord, and return. Yes, but how many have I seen pass on and”
― Ralph Ellison, Juneteenth

“college boys working to return to school down South; older advocates of racial progress with Utopian schemes for building black business empires; preachers ordained by no authority except their own, without church or congregation, without bread or wine, body or blood; the community "leaders" without followers; old men of sixty or more still caught up in post-Civil-War dreams of freedom within segregation; the pathetic ones who possessed nothing beyond their dreams of being gentlemen, who held small jobs or drew small pensions, and all pretending to be engaged in some vast, though obscure, enterprise, who affected the pseudo-courtly manners of certain southern congressmen and bowed and nodded as they passed like senile old roosters in a barnyard; the younger crowd for whom I now felt a contempt such as only a disillusioned dreamer feels for those still unaware that they dream -- the business students from southern colleges, for whom business was a vague, abstract game with rules as obsolete as Noah's Ark but who yet were drunk on finance. Yes, and that older group with similar aspirations, the "fundamentalists," the "actors" who sought to achieve the status of brokers through imagination alone, a group of janitors and messengers who spent most of their wages on clothing such as was fashionable among Wall Street brokers, with their Brooks Brothers suits and bowler hats, English umbrellas, black calfskin shoes and yellow gloves; with their orthodox and passionate argument as to what was the correct tie to wear with what shirt, what shade of gray was correct for spats and what would the Prince of Wales wear at a certain seasonal event; should field glasses be slung from the right or from the left shoulder; who never read the financial pages though they purchased the Wall Street Journal religiously and carried it beneath the left elbow, pressed firm against the body and grasped in the left hand -- always manicured and gloved, fair weather or foul -- with an easy precision (Oh, they had style) while the other hand whipped a tightly rolled umbrella back and forth at a calculated angle; with their homburgs and Chesterfields, their polo coats and Tyrolean hats worn strictly as fashion demanded. I could feel their eyes, saw them all and saw too the time when they would know that my prospects were ended and saw already the contempt they'd feel for me, a college man who had lost his prospects and pride. I could see it all and I knew that even the officials and the older men would despise me as though, somehow, in losing my place in Bledsoe's world I had betrayed them . . . I saw it as they looked at my overalls.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“For we select neither our parents, our race nor our nation; these occur to us out of the love, the hate, the circumstances, the fate, of others.”
― Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act

“And I knew in spite of the anguish within me that the sun goeth down.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisble Man

“Identity! My God! Who has any identity anymore anyway?”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“What is commonly assumed to be past history is actually as much a part of the living present as William Faulkner insisted. Furtive, implacable and tricky, it inspirits both the observer and the scene observed, artifacts, manners and atmosphere and it speaks even when no one wills to listen.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“We seek not perfection, but coordination. Not sterile stability but creative momentum.”
― Ralph Ellison, Juneteenth

“the trouble is that there is little the dead can do; otherwise they wouldn’t be the dead. No! But on the other hand, it would be a great mistake to assume that the dead are absolutely powerless. They are powerless only to give the full answer to the new questions posed for the living by history. But they try! Whenever they hear the imperious cries of the people in a crisis, the dead respond. Right now in this country, with its many national groups, all the old heroes are being called back to life—Jefferson, Jackson, Pulaski, Garibaldi, Booker T. Washington, Sun Yat-sen, Danny O’Connell, Abraham Lincoln and countless others are being asked to step once again upon the stage of history. I can’t say too emphatically that we stand at a terminal point in history, at a moment of supreme world crisis. Destruction lies ahead unless things are changed. And things must be changed. And changed by the people.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“And all the more so because the voice seemed well aware that a piece of science fiction was the last thing I aspired to write. In fact, it seemed to tease me with allusions to that pseudoscientific sociological concept which held that most Afro-American difficulties sprang from our “high visibilityâ€�; a phrase as double-dealing and insidious as its more recent oxymoronic cousins, “benign neglectâ€� and “reverse discrimination,â€� both of which translate “Keep those Negroes running-but in their same old place.â€� My friends had made wry jokes out of the term for many years, suggesting that while the darker brother was clearly “checked and balancedâ€�-and kept far more checked than balanced-on the basis of his darkness he glowed, nevertheless, within the American conscience with such intensity that most whites feigned moral blindness toward his predicament; and these included the waves of late arrivals who refused to recognize the vast extent to which they too benefited from his second-class status while placing all the blame on white southerners.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time been ashamed.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“These white folk have newspapers, magazines, radios, spokesmen to get their ideas across. If they want to tell the world a lie, they can tell it so well that it becomes the truth;”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“What and how much had I lost by trying to do what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do? What a waste, what a senseless waste! But what of those things which you actually didn't like, not because you were not supposed to like them, not because to dislike them was considered a mark of refinement and education—but because you actually found them distasteful? The very idea annoyed me. How could you know? It involved a problem of choice. I would have to weigh many things carefully before deciding and there would be some things that would cause quite a bit of trouble, simply because I had never formed a personal attitude toward so much. I had accepted attitudes and it had made life seem simple...”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“You’re nobody, son. You don’t exist—can’t you see that?”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“And while fiction is but a form of symbolic action, a mere game of “as if,â€� therein lies its true function and its potential for effecting change.”
― 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.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“I yam who I am”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisble Man

“But live you must, and you can either make passive love to your sickness or burn it out and go on to the next conflicting phase. â€� Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man. (Vintage International; 2nd edition March 14, 1995) Originally published 1952.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Loved as the defeated come to love the symbols of their conquerors.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“I had no doubt that I could do something, but what, and how? I had no contacts and I believed in nothing. And the obsession with my identity which I had developed in the factory hospital returned with a vengeance. Who was I, how had I come to be? Certainly I couldn’t help being different from when I left the campus; but now a new, painful, contradictory voice had grown up within me, and between its demands for revengeful action and Mary’s silent pressure I throbbed with guilt and puzzlement. I wanted peace and quiet, tranquillity, but was too much aboil inside. Somewhere beneath the load of the emotion-freezing ice which my life had conditioned my brain to produce, a spot of black anger glowed and threw off a hot red light of such intensity that had Lord Kelvin known of its existence, he would have had to revise his measurements.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“I faced them knowing that the madman in a foreign costume was real and yet unreal, knowing that he wanted my life, that he held me responsible for all the nights and days and all the suffering and for all that which I was incapable of controlling, and I no hero, but short and dark with only a certain eloquence and a bottomless capacity for being a fool to mark me from the rest”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisble Man

“Why had they found us? For the occasion his death gave them to express their protestations, a time and place to come together looking in a common direction? Did it signify love or politicized hate?”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisble 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 manâ€� 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

“…wondering what in the world had made him open his heart to me. That was something I never did; it was dangerous. First, it was dangerous if you felt like that about anything, because then you’d never get it or something or someone would take it away from you; then it was dangerous because nobody would understand you and they’d only laugh and think you were crazy.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“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?”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Toata viata am cautat ceva si, oriunde m-as fi indreptat, cineva incerca sa-mi spuna ce este acel ceva. Am acceptat raspunsurile fiecaruia, desi erau deseori contradictorii unele fata de altele sau chiar fata de ele insele. Am fost naiv. Ma cautam pe mine insumi si intrebam pe oricine, mai putin pe mine, intrebari la care eu, si numai eu, puteam gasi raspunsul.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“if you don’t, you’re already dead anyway. Now hush, because you’re simply thinking words, old saws. So hush…all is noise.”
― Ralph Ellison, Juneteenth

“If It's Optic White, It's the Right White,”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“with the combatants being the same people, civil wars are never really won; and because their most devastating engagements are fought within the individual human heart.”
― Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act

“I've illuminated the blackness of my invisibility—and vice versa.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man