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“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

“Whence all this passion toward conformity anyway? - diversity is the word. Let man keep his many parts and you'll have no tyrant states.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“remember the short formal sermons intoned from the pulpit there, rendered in smooth articulate tones, with calm assurance purged of that wild emotion of the crude preachers most of us knew in our home towns and of whom we were deeply ashamed,”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“collectivity of politically astute citizens who, by virtue of our vaunted system of universal education and our freedom of opportunity, would be prepared to govern.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own. I have also been called one thing and then another while no one really wished to hear what I called myself.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Whence all this passion toward conformity anyway?—diversity is the word. Let man keep his many parts and you’ll have no tyrant states.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“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. All things, it is said, are duly recorded--all things of importance, that is. 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. But the cop would be Clifton's historian, his judge, his witness, and his executioner, and I was the only brother in the watching crowd. And I, the only witness for the defense, knew neither the extent of his guilt nor the nature of his crime. Where were the historians today? And how would they put it down?”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“And yet, it was a strangely satisfying experience for an invisible man to hear the silence of sound.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“So if the ideal of achieving a true political equality eludes us in reality—as it continues to do—there is still available that fictional vision of an ideal democracy in which the actual combines with the ideal and gives us representations of a state of things in which the highly placed and the lowly, the black and the white, the northerner and the southerner, the native-born and the immigrant are combined to tell us of transcendent truths and possibilities such as those discovered when Mark Twain set Huck and Jim afloat on the raft.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Man’s hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or a moaning dove.”
― Ralph Ellison

“You see,â€� he said turning to Mr Norton, “he has eyes and ears and a good distended African nose, but he fails to understand the simple facts of life. Understand. 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—well, bless my soul! Behold! 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

“My God, boy! You’re black and living in the South—did you forget how to lie?”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Education Is All A Matter Of Building Bridges”
― Ralph Ellison

“Until some gang succeeds in putting the world in a strait jacket, its definition is possibility.”
― Ralph Ellison

“I knew that they were about to attack the man and I was both afraid and
angry, repelled and fascinated. I both wanted it and feared the consequences, was
outraged and angered at what I saw and yet surged with fear; not for the man or
of the consequences of an attack, but of what the sight of violence might release
in me. And beneath it all there boiled up all the shock-absorbing phrases that I
had learned all my life. I seemed to totter on the edge of a great dark hole.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“bilious”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Above the decorous walking around me, sounds of footsteps leaving the verandas of far-flung buildings and moving toward the walks and over the walks to the asphalt drives lined with whitewashed stones, those cryptic messages for men and women, boys and girls heading quietly toward where the visitors waited, and we moving not in the mood of worship but of judgement; as though even here in the filtering dusk, here beneath the deep indigo sky, here, alive with looping swifts and darting moths, here in the hereness of the night not yet lighted by the moon that looms blood-red behind the chapel like a fallen sun, its radiance shedding not upon the here-dusk of twittering bats, nor on the there-night of cricket and whippoorwill, but focused short-rayed upon our place of convergence; and we drifting forward with rigid motions, limbs stiff and voices now silent, as though on exhibit even in the dark, and the moon a white man's bloodshot eye.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“a delegate shout out from the floor: “Peonage, Anti-Lynch Bill, poll tax, these are our issues. They are the most controversial issues in American life, and some of us will have to die for them! Yes, we want to join with the CIO! We cannot stop for controversy!â€� And there in the faces of my people I saw strength. There with the whites in the audience I saw the positive forces of civilization and the best guarantee of America’s future.”
― Ralph Ellison

“For the first time, as I swung along the streets, I thought consciously of how I had conducted myself at home. I hadn't worried too much about whites as people. Some were friendly and some were not, and you tried not to offend either. But here they all seemed impersonal; and yet when most impersonal they startled me by being polite, by begging my pardon after brushing against me in a crowd. Still 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 . . .”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“What did I do To be so black And blue?”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“You ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world, that you're part of all the sound and anguish”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“I'll teach you some good bad habits. You'll need 'em.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“What is wrong with this gentleman, Sylvester?â€� the tall one said. ‘A man’s dying outside!â€� I said. ‘Someone is always dying,â€� the other one said. ‘Yes, and it’s good to die beneath God’s great tent of sky.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Call me Jack-the-Bear, for I am in a state of hibernation.”
― Ralph Ellison

“Let man keep his many parts and you’ll have no tyrant states.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“They were all such a part of that other life that's dead that I can't remember them all. (Time was as I was, but neither that time nor that "I" are anymore.)”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Behold! 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

“in the world is the spectacle of the whites busy escaping blackness and becoming blacker every day, and the blacks striving toward whiteness, becoming quite dull and gray. None of us seems to know who he is or where he's going.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“you often doubt if you really exist. You wonder whether you aren’t simple a phantom in other people’s minds. Say, a figure in a nightmare which the sleeper tries with all his strength to destroyâ€� You ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world, that you’re a part of all the sound and anguish, and you strike out with your fists, you curse and you swear to make them recognize you. And, alas, it’s seldom successful.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“But seriously, because you both fail to understand what is happening to you. You cannot see or hear or smell the truth of what you see -- and you, looking for destiny! It's classic! 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 score-card 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 force --”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man