Ralph Ellison Quotes

It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.

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.

Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.

Education is all a matter of building bridges.

I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves or figments of their imagination, indeed, everything and anything except me.

When I discover who I am, I'll be free.

If you can show me how I can cling to that which is real to me, while teaching me a way into the larger society, then and only then will I drop my defenses and hostility, and I will sing your praises and help you to make the desert bear fruit.

The world is a possibility if only you'll discover it.

At best Americans give but a limited attention to history. Too much happens too rapidly, and before we can evaluate it, or exhaust its meaning or pleasure, there is something new to concern us. Ours is the tempo of the motion picture, not that of the still camera, and we waste experience as we wasted the forest.

I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.

I am an invisible man. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids - and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.

America is woven of many strands. I would recognise them and let it so remain. Our fate is to become one, and yet many. This is not prophecy, but description.

What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?

There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.

I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed.

Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled 'file and forget.'

And I knew that it was better to live out one's absurdity than to die for that of others.

I am nobody but myself.

Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.

Power, for the writer....lies in his ability to reveal if only a little bit more about the complexity of humanity.

In order to travel far you have to be detached.

Without involvement, there is no commitment. Mark it down, asterisk it, circle it, underline it." Stephen Covey "It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.

If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to bind, imprison and destroy.

I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.

The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.