Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
RALPH ELLISONEducation is all a matter of building bridges.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority. The universal in the novel-and isn’t that what we’re all clamoring for these days?-is reached only through the depiction of the specific man in a specific circumstance.
RALPH ELLISON -
Education is all a matter of building bridges.
RALPH ELLISON -
I suspect that all the agony that goes into writing is borne precisely because the writer longs for acceptance-but it must be acceptance on his own terms.
RALPH ELLISON -
I am nobody but myself.
RALPH ELLISON -
America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
RALPH ELLISON -
Man’s hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.
RALPH ELLISON -
When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
RALPH ELLISON -
If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?
RALPH ELLISON -
I denounce because though implicated and partially responsible, I have been hurt to the point of abysmal pain, hurt to the point of invisibility. And I defend because in spite of it all, I find that I love.
RALPH ELLISON -
I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed.
RALPH ELLISON -
I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
RALPH ELLISON -
I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
RALPH ELLISON -
…and yet I am what they think I am.
RALPH ELLISON -
That which we remember is, more often than not, that which we would like to have been; or that which we hope to be. Thus our memory and our identity are ever at odds; our history ever a tale told by inattentive idealists.
RALPH ELLISON -
The clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.
RALPH ELLISON