01c. 1954 ADWhat 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? What a waste, what a senseless waste! But what of those things which you actually didn't like, not because you were not supposed to like them, not because to dislike them was considered a mark of refinement and education - but because you actually found them distasteful? The very idea annoyed me. How could you know? It involved a problem of choice. I would have to weigh many things carefully before deciding and there would be some things that would cause quite a bit of trouble, simply because I had never formed a personal attitude toward so much. I had accepted the accepted attitudes and it had made life seem simple ...Ralph Ellison / quote ↗
02c. 1954 ADEverywhere I've turned somebody has wanted to sacrifice me for my own good—only /they/ were the ones who benefited. And now we start on the old sacrificial merry-go-round. At what point do we stop?Ralph Ellison / quote ↗
03c. 1954 AD...out of the counterfeiting of the black American's identity [in blackface minstrelsy] there arises a profound doubt in the white man's mind as to the authenticity of his own image of himself. He, after all, went into the business when he refused the king's shilling and revolted. He had put on a mask of his own, as it were...For the ex-colonials, the declaration of an American identity meant the assumption of a mask, and it imposed not only the discipline of national self-consciousness, it gave Americans an ironic awareness of the joke that always lies between appearance and reality, between the discontinuity of social tradition and that sense of the past which clings to the mind. And perhaps even an awareness of the joke that society is man's creation, not God's. Americans began their revolt from the English fatherland when they dumped the tea into Boston Harbor, masked as Indians, and the mobility of the society created in this limitless space has encouraged the use of the mask for good and evil ever since.Ralph Ellison / quote ↗
04c. 1954 ADDeep at the dark bottom of the melting pot, where the private is public and the public private, where black is white and white black, where the immoral becomes moral and the moral is anything that makes one feel good (or that one has the power to sustain), the white man's relish is apt to be the black man's gall.Ralph Ellison / quote ↗
05c. 1954 ADWhen American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.Ralph Ellison / quote ↗
06c. 1954 AD...she was something more- a force, a stable, familiar force like something out of my past which kept me from whirling off into some unknown which I dared not face. It was a most painful position for at the same time Mary reminded me constantly that something was expected of me, some act of leadership, some newsworthy achievement;...Ralph Ellison / quote ↗
07c. 1954 ADI 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. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in a circus sideshow, 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.Ralph Ellison / quote ↗
08c. 1954 ADAnd all Negroes at some period of their lives there is that yearning for a sense of group unity that is the yearning of men for a flag: for a unity that cannot be compromised, that cannot be bought; that is conscious of itself, of its strength, that is militant.Ralph Ellison / quote ↗
09c. 1954 ADHe only wanted to use me for something. Everyone wanted to use you for some purpose.Ralph Ellison / quote ↗
10c. 1954 ADSo why do I write, torturing myself to put it down? Because in spite of myself I've learned some things. Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled "file and forget," and I can neither file nor forget. Nor will certain ideas forget me; they keep filing away at my lethargy, my complacency. Why should I be the one to dream this nightmare?Ralph Ellison / quote ↗
11c. 1954 ADI am standing puzzled, unable to decide whether the veil is really being lifted, or lowered more firmly in place; whether I am witnessing a revelation or a more efficient blinding.Ralph Ellison / quote ↗
12c. 1954 ADCan it be, I thought, can it actually be? .......could he be all of them: Rine the runner and Rine the gambler and Rine the briber and Rine the lover and Rinehart the Reverend? Could he himself be both rind and heart? .....Rinehart the rounder. It was true as I was true. His world was possibility and he knew it. He was years ahead of me and I was a fool. I must have been crazy and blind. The world in which we lived was without boundaries...All boundaries down, freedom was not only the recognition of necessity, it was the recognition of possibility. And sitting there trembling I caught a brief glimpse of the possibilities posed by Rinehart’s multiple personalities…Ralph Ellison / quote ↗
13c. 1954 ADAll my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was.Ralph Ellison / quote ↗
14c. 1954 ADSo now they're shaking in their boots and looking for someone to give them the answer they want to hear. Not the truth, but some lie that will protect them from the truthRalph Ellison / quote ↗
16c. 1954 ADEvery serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty.Ralph Ellison / quote ↗
17c. 1954 ADBy 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 / quote ↗
18c. 1954 ADThe understanding of art depends finally upon one's willingness to extend one's humanity and one's knowledge of human life.Ralph Ellison / quote ↗
20c. 1954 ADSome 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 / quote ↗
