Ralph Ellison

“I knew that it was better to live out one’s own absurdity than to die for that of others.”

“For, like almost everyone else in our country, I started out with my share of optimism. I believed in hard work and progress and action, but now, after first being 'for' society and then 'against' it, I assign myself no rank or any limit, and such an attitude is very much against the trend of the times. But my world has become one of infinite possibilities. What a phrase - still it's a good phrase and a good view of life, and a man shouldn't accept any other; that much I've learned underground. Until some gang succeeds in putting the world in a strait jacket, its definition is possibility.”

“It goes a long way back, some twenty years. All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naive. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. 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. But first I had to discover that I am an invisible man!”

“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?”

“Words are your business, boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock, the answer to the question.”

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

“Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.”

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

“We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.”

“When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.”