Today is the birthday of Ralph Waldo Ellison (March 1, 1914 – April 16, 1994), novelist, literary critic, scholar and writer. He is best known for his novel Invisible Man."The world is a possibility if only you'll discover it."
— Ralph Ellison
"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!"
— Ralph Ellison
"I am an invisible man. No I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allen 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, simply because people refuse to see me."
— Ralph Ellison
"I remember that I'm invisible and walk softly so as not awake the sleeping ones. Sometimes it is best not to awaken them; there are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers."
— Ralph Ellison
"And I knew that it was better to live out one's absurdity than to die for that of others."
— Ralph Ellison
"When I discover who I am, I’ll be free."
— Ralph Ellison
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