It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
RALPH ELLISONIt takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
RALPH ELLISONThere must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientists, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale.
RALPH ELLISONThe clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.
RALPH ELLISONI blundered into writing.
RALPH ELLISONI was never more hated than when I tried to be honest. Or when, even as just now I’ve tried to articulate exactly what I felt to be the truth. No one was satisfied
RALPH ELLISONI was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
RALPH ELLISONIf only all the contradictory voices shouting in my head would calm down and sing a song in unison, whatever it was I wouldn’t care as long as they sang without dissonance.
RALPH ELLISONLife is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
RALPH ELLISONAnd my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own.
RALPH ELLISONIf social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?
RALPH ELLISONI am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed.
RALPH ELLISONI am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms.
RALPH ELLISONWhat and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?
RALPH ELLISONI am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
RALPH ELLISONIn those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
RALPH ELLISONI feel the need to reaffirm all of it, the whole unhappy territory and all the things loved and unloveable in it, for it is all part of me.
RALPH ELLISON