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.
– Ralph Ellison
By and large, the critics and readers gave me an affirmed sense of my identity as a writer. You might know this within yourself, but to have it affirmed by others is of utmost importance. Writing is, after all, a form of communication.
– Ralph Ellison
Commercial rock 'n' roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression.
– Ralph Ellison
Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
– Ralph Ellison
I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
– Ralph Ellison
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
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
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
The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
– Ralph Ellison
The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstances, whether created by others or by one's own human failing.
– Ralph Ellison
When I discover who I am, I'll be free.
– Ralph Ellison
The understanding of art depends finally upon one's willingness to extend one's humanity and one's knowledge of human life.