Looking for the best and inspirational Ralph Ellison quotes?
Ralph Ellison was an African American author best known for his novel Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. At the age of 16, he left Oklahoma to attend Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Ellison graduated at 22 with a Bachelor of Science in Agriculture.
He took a series of jobs before enrolling in New York University to study English and creative writing (MFA). He studied under professors such as Leo Marx and Mark Van Doren, who encouraged Ellison to write about what he knew—the black man’s struggle for identity in America.
Ellison’s first novel was published in 1952, but it wasn’t until 1964 when he released his second novel, Invisible Man, which established him as one of America’s premier writers.
Check out his motivating thoughts & quotes that will help you pursue your goals.
39 Inspirational Ralph Ellison Quotes
1. “Words are your business, boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock, the answer to the question.” ― Ralph Ellison
2. “If only all the contradictory voices shouting in 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.” ― Ralph Ellison
3. “I feel the need to reaffirm all of it, the whole unhappy territory and all the things loved and unlovable in it, for it is all part of me.” ― Ralph Ellison
4. “We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.” ― Ralph Ellison
5. “While fiction is but a form of symbolic action, a mere game of “as if,” therein lies its true function and its potential for effecting change.” ― Ralph Ellison
6. “I remember that I’m invisible and walk softly so as not awake the sleeping ones. Sometimes it is best not to awaken them; there are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.” ― Ralph Ellison
7. “Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.” ― Ralph Ellison
8. “The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.” ― Ralph Ellison
9. “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
10. “Play the game, but don’t believe in it – that much you owe yourself … Play the game, but raise the ante, my boy. Learn how it operates, learn how you operate.” ― Ralph Ellison
11. “I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed.” ― Ralph Ellison
12. “For now, I had begun to believe, despite all the talk of science around me, that there was a magic in spoken words.” ― Ralph Ellison
13. “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.” ― Ralph Ellison
14. “Power, for the writer…. lies in his ability to reveal if only a little bit more about the complexity of humanity.” ― Ralph Ellison
15. “Now I know men are different and that all life is divided and that only in division is there true health.” ― Ralph Ellison
16. “It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.” ― Ralph Ellison
17. “Man’s hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.” ― Ralph Ellison
18. “Nothing, storm or flood, must get in the way of our need for light and ever more and brighter light. The truth is the light and light is the truth.” ― Ralph Ellison
19. “Our task, then always, is to challenge the apparent forms of reality-that is, the fixed manner and values of the few, and to struggle with it until it reveals its mad, vari-implicated chaos, its false face, and so on until it surrenders its insight, its truth.” ― Ralph Ellison
20. “For now I had begun to believe, despite all the talk of science around me, that there was a magic in spoken words.” ― Ralph Ellison
21. “Nothing ever stops; it divides and multiplies, and I guess sometimes it gets ground down superfine, but it doesn’t just blow away.” ― Ralph Ellison
22. “Education is all a matter of building bridges.” ― Ralph Ellison
23. “The world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.” ― Ralph Ellison
24. “Hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.” ― Ralph Ellison
25. “Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are. That must be it, I thought—to lose your direction is to lose your face.” ― Ralph Ellison
26. “The world is just as concrete, ornery, vile, and sublimely wonderful as before, only now I better understand my relation to it and it to me.” ― Ralph Ellison
27. “Having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge.” ― Ralph Ellison
28. “The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.” ― Ralph Ellison
29. “If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to blind, imprison, and destroy.” ― Ralph Ellison
30. “Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself out of those values.” ― Ralph Ellison
31. “Power doesn’t have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it.” ― Ralph Ellison
32. “Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.” ― Ralph Ellison
33. “Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.” ― Ralph Ellison
34. “I don’t allow anonymous people to give me a sense of my worth.” ― Ralph Ellison
35. “Some things are just too unjust for words, and too ambiguous for either speech or ideas.” ― Ralph Ellison
36. “When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.” ― Ralph Ellison
37. “I was no longer afraid. Not of important men, not of trustees and such; for knowing now that there was nothing which I could expect from them, there was no reason to be afraid.” ― Ralph Ellison
38. “And the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived. That goes for societies as well as for individuals.” ― Ralph Ellison
39. “The understanding of art depends finally upon one’s willingness to extend one’s humanity and one’s knowledge of human life.” ― Ralph Ellison
