When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
RALPH ELLISONWhen American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
RALPH ELLISONEclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.
RALPH ELLISONIf social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?
RALPH ELLISONPlease, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
RALPH ELLISONYou start Saul, and end up Paul,’ my grandfather had often said. ‘When you’re a youngun, you Saul, but let life whup your head a bit and you starts to trying to be Paul – though you still Sauls around on the side.
RALPH ELLISONCommercial rock ‘n’ roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression.
RALPH ELLISONLight confirms my reality, gives birth to my form…without light I am not only invisible but formless as well; and to be unaware of one’s form is to live a death…the truth is the light and light is the truth.
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 ELLISONThe truth is the light and the light is the truth.
RALPH ELLISONThe world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.
RALPH ELLISONI blundered into writing.
RALPH ELLISONAnd while the ice was melting to form a flood in which I threatened to drown I awoke one afternoon to find that my first northern winter had set.
RALPH ELLISONI 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 ELLISONAmerica is woven of many strands. I would recognise them and let it so remain. Our fate is to become one, and yet many. This is not prophecy, but description.
RALPH ELLISONI’m not a separatist. The imagination is integrative. That’s how you make the new — by putting something else with what you’ve got. And I’m unashamedly an American integrationist.
RALPH ELLISONThe end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
RALPH ELLISON