Ralph Ellison

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

The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.

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.

Commercial rock ’n’ roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music … an obscene looting of a cultural expression.

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. 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.

The truth is the light and light is the truth.

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

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

Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.

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?

I am one of the most irresponsible beings that ever lived. Irresponsibility is part of my invisibility; any way you face it, it is a denial. But to whom can I be responsible, and why should I be, when you refuse to see me?