Ralph Ellison Quotes

I am never more myself than in my self-betrayals.

My personality doesn't interest me.

One of my problems is to find the self.

I'm asked all the time in interviews about who I am, and I know a few people my age who have a strong sense of self, but I couldn't say I know myself and sum it up and give it to you in a little package. I don't know myself at all yet.

I've never, ever labeled myself.

A man is sometimes as different from himself as he is from others.

In order to find yourself, who you really are, you got to be with yourself; you got to hang out with yourself.

I don't even know who I am. All I know is that I am the sibling, daughter, sister, the friend of somebody, and I need to know who I am outside of that.

'Shortcomings' was me figuring out who I am.

Josh Billings said, It is not only the most difficult thing to know oneself, but the most inconvenient one, too. Human beings have always employed an enormous variety of clever devices for running away from themselves, and the modern world is particularly rich in such stratagems.

I have never known a greater miracle, or monster, than myself.

You have not known what you are - you have slumber'd upon yourself all your life; Your eye-lids have been the same as closed most of the time; What you have done returns already in mockeries; Your thrift, knowledge, prayers, if they do not return in mockeries, what is their return? The mockeries are not you; Underneath them, and within them, I see you lurk.

What are we taking from people and what do we give is a life-long struggle, I think, for most of us. Who are we? Do we like who we are? Do we know who we are? Do we care? Does anyone care? That's such a big topic. I could tackle that in many movies. So could other people.

One of the basic laws of human existence is: find yourself, know yourself, be yourself.

I look for myself but find no one. I belong to the chrysanthemum hour of bright flowers placed in tall vases. I should make an ornament of my soul.

I don't know who I am. Or maybe I do know who I am and I just don't want to be her anymore.

Perhaps, as we say in America, I wanted to find myself. This is an interesting phrase, not current as far as I know in the language of any other people, which certainly does not mean what it says but betrays a nagging suspicion that something has been misplaced. I think now that if I had any intimation that the self I was going to find would turn out to be only the same self from which I had spent so much time in flight, I would have stayed at home.

I understand that nobody understands me, but I can't be someone I'm not.

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

When you don't know your values or who you are or you start to believe things other people are telling you, you get lost. I was just lost because I didn't know what I meant to music or what music meant to me. Now I just belong solo and I belong by myself.

Within our whole universe the story only has the authority to answer that cry of heart of its characters, that one cry of heart of each of them: "Who am I?"

Sometimes when we awaken from the bad dream of disowning ourselves, we think that the sojourn to self-discovery is a new one. But it is an ancient quest.

I don't know who I am. But I do know who I'm not. I have occasionally tried playing people I'm definitely not, and that wasn't a very pleasant experience.

When you're looking for someone, you're looking for some aspect of yourself, even if you don't know it ... What we're searching for is what we lack.

I am still so naïve; I know pretty much what I like and dislike; but please, don’t ask me who I am. A passionate, fragmentary girl, maybe?