Ralph Ellison

It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.

[H]aving tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, 1 must come out, I must emerge.

Power doesn’t have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, 1 self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it.

I suddenly recall the arpeggios of laughter lilting across the tender, springtime grass—gay-welling, far- floating, fluent, spontaneous, a bell-like feminine fluting, then suppressed; as though snuffed swiftly and irrevocably beneath the quiet solemnity of the vespered air now vibrant with somber chapel bells.

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.

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

As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.

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