A delegate shout out from the floor: “Peonage, Anti-Lynch Bill, poll tax, these are our issues. They are the most controversial issues in American life, and some of us will have to die for them! Yes, we want to join with the CIO! We cannot stop for controversy!” And there in the faces of my people I saw strength. There with the whites in the audience I saw the positive forces of civilization and the best guarantee of America’s future.

— Ralph Ellison

All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was.

— Ralph Ellison

And 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

And while the ice was melting to form a flood in which I threatened to drown I awoke one afternoon to find that my first northern winter had set.

— Ralph Ellison

But what a feeling can come over a man just from seeing the things he believes in and hopes for symbolized in the concrete form of a man. In something that gives a focus to all the other things he knows to be real. Something that makes unseen things manifest and allows him to come to his hopes and dreams through his outer eye and through the touch and feel of his natural hand.

— Ralph Ellison

By 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

Can it be, I thought, can it actually be? .......could he be all of them: Fine the runner and Fine the gambler and Fine the briber and Fine the lover and Reinhart 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 Reinhart’s multiple personalities…

— Ralph Ellison

Deep 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

Education is all a matter of building bridges.

— Ralph Ellison

Every 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