Ralph Ellison Quotes

In life, we are told to do or be so many different things and expected to fit so many different expectations; I think that's something I always had a hard time with.

Even if I turned myself in, it wouldn't change anything. It wouldn't make me one of them. I knew that when I got my powers, but really I knew it before then. I learned it as a child on my first day of school, on the warm rainy streets of Bangkok, and in college. If you're different you always know it, and you can't fix it even if you want to. What do you do when you find out your heart is the wrong kind? You take what you're given, and be the hero you can be. Hero to your own cold, inverted heart.

I had been in a place where I was letting too many people dictate who I should be and what I should be, and I was trying to make everybody happy to the point where it was just killing me. I'd completely lost myself. It's kind of funny now that people think I've completely changed myself for Marilyn Manson, when this is actually the first time in my life that I took a stand and said, "This is who I am and this is who I've always wanted to be, and I'm finally with somebody who lets me be who I want to be."

She had for so many years been trying to be like other people, that she was now like nothing in heaven or earth.

I've always felt a little misrepresented in the world.

People can try to make me into anything they want, but I think they're really throwing around language but saying the same thing.

Sometimes I try to lose my identity, and I can't get rid of it!

It was then that I realized that while playing the well-meaning tolerant individual (in short: liberal) garnered you fans and grades, it didn't matter. In my heart and head, I was a fraud.

It's a hell of a responsibility to be yourself. It's much easier to be somebody else or nobody at all.

I find sometimes it's easy to be myself, sometimes I find it's better to be somebody else.

For years I've wanted to live according to everyone else's morals. I've forced myself to live like everyone else, to look like everyone else. I said what was necessary to join together, even when I felt separate. And after all of this, catastrophe came. Now I wander amid the debris, I am lawless, torn to pieces, alone and accepting to be so, resigned to my singularity and to my infirmities. And I must rebuild a truth-after having lived all my life in a sort of lie.

I can't stand outside myself and be anybody else.

The conformist understands that the reason of his desperate look for conformism is that he realises he is different and that he never accepted his difference.

People are always going to identify with what it's like living in society and have people judge you in certain ways, and how you can be strong enough to be your own person and all those good things.

There was a period when I had a hard time reconciling all the different parts of me in a way that I thought would make sense to others.

I am a very honest person, and I can only say there are moments in my life where I really did think I was being me in the sense of my morals and beliefs and the way I acted. But when I look back at certain things that I wore and my hair and make-up, I was like, 'Whoa! That wasn't me!' But I didn't know it back then.

It's so much easier to know who you are when there aren't a thousand people telling you who they think you are.

I was born in 1949, and by the time I was 10, I figured out that my hope chest was not aimed in the same direction everybody else's was. And that life was going to be very, very complicated. And that I could either be provocative and declamatory, or shy, retiring and scared.

When who you are naturally is not only considered a sin, but you're reviled for being that human being and you don't have any control over it, there are lots of issues that come into play. And it takes a lot of presence, determination, courage and space to figure out how to land in that truth regardless of what anyone around you thinks about it.

That's definitely something I've experienced my whole life - people thinking one thing and then discovering that I'm not, hopefully. So I relate to having to fight that and claim my own identity, when people are trying to throw different ones at me.

'Different' is such a good word. For me, ever since I was little, I always felt that something was off. And I just didn't have the resources to - I just didn't know what it was.

We all want to be someone else but without ceasing to be ourselves. I think it's very important to defend this idea in real life too.

I've learned a lot about how people have to fight through their whole lives just to be themselves.

Now all of a sudden I'm so less interested in pretending to be a lot of other people, and much more interested in being me.

I've never, ever labeled myself.