The Best Ralph Ellison quotes

The truth is the light and the light is the truth. — Ralph Ellison

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

My hole is warm and full of light. — Ralph Ellison

The sun had become a light yellow yolk and was walking with red legs across the sky. — Zora Neale Hurston

We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough. — Ralph Ellison

There is two things everybody got to find out for theirselves. They got to find out about love and they got to find out about living. — Zora Neale Hurston

I love myself when I am laughing. . . and then again when I am looking mean and impressive. — Zora Neale Hurston

When one is too old for love, one finds great comfort in good dinners. — Zora Neale Hurston

It seems that tears and laughter, love and hate, make up the sum of life! — Zora Neale Hurston

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

She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie’s first dream was dead, so she became a woman. — Zora Neale Hurston

God is love, I said, but art’s the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity. — Ralph Ellison

Perhaps I am just a coward who loves to laugh at life better than I do cry with it. But when I do get to crying, boy, I can roll a mean tear. — Zora Neale Hurston

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 it all, I find that I love. — Ralph Ellison

Perhaps everyone loved someone; I didn’t now, I couldn’t give much thought to love; in order to travel far you had to be detached, and I had the long road back to the campus before me. — Ralph Ellison

Love is like the sea. It’s a moving thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from the shore it meets, and it’s different with every shore. — Zora Neale Hurston

Janie looked down on him and felt a self–crushing love. So her soul crawled out from its hiding place. — Zora Neale Hurston

He Drifted off into sleep and Janie looked down on him and felt a self–crushing love. So her soul crawled out from its hiding place. — Zora Neale Hurston

Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place. — Zora Neale Hurston

To hell with being ashamed of what you liked. — Ralph Ellison

There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers. — Ralph Ellison

The world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it. — Ralph Ellison

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

Bitterness is the coward’s revenge on the world for having been hurt. — Zora Neale Hurston

That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang. — Ralph Ellison

Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by. — Ralph Ellison

But we are all human, I thought, wondering what I meant. — Ralph Ellison

There is nothing to make you like other human beings so much as doing things for them. — Zora Neale Hurston

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

There must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientists, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale. — Ralph Ellison

It seemed to me that the human beings I met reacted pretty much the same to the same stimuli. Different idioms,yes. Circumstances and conditions having power to influence, yes. Inherent difference, no. — Zora Neale Hurston

The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have. — Ralph Ellison

When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical. — Ralph Ellison

The understanding of art depends finally upon one’s willingness to extend one’s humanity and one’s knowledge of human life. — Ralph Ellison

Now I know men are different and that all life is divided and that only in division is there true health. — Ralph Ellison

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

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

We don’t all dig Shakespeare uniformly, or even ‘Little Red Riding Hood.’ The understanding of art depends finally upon one’s willingness to extend one’s humanity and one’s knowledge of human life. — Ralph Ellison

Being under my own roof, and my personality not invaded by others makes a lot of difference in my outlook on life and everything. Oh, to be once more alone in a house! — Zora Neale Hurston

Life is as the sea, art a ship in which man conquers life’s crushing formlessness, reducing it to a course, a series of swells, tides and wind currents inscribed on a chart. — Ralph Ellison

Janie saw her life like a great tree in leaf with the things suffered, things enjoyed, things done and undone. Dawn and doom was in the branches — Zora Neale Hurston

I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. — Ralph Ellison

I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood–movie ectoplasms. — Ralph Ellison

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

All dreamers and sleepwalkers must pay the price, and even the invisible victim is responsible for the fate of all. — Ralph Ellison

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. — Ralph Ellison