God is love, I said, but art’s the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.
RALPH ELLISONIt is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
-
-
Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
RALPH ELLISON -
The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstances, whether created by others or by one’s own human failing.
RALPH ELLISON -
Words are your business, boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock, the answer to the question.
RALPH ELLISON -
My hole is warm and full of light.
RALPH ELLISON -
We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
RALPH ELLISON -
I am an invisible man. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids – and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
RALPH ELLISON -
Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
RALPH ELLISON -
And I knew that it was better to live out one’s absurdity than to die for that of others.
RALPH ELLISON -
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 -
The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
RALPH ELLISON -
Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
RALPH ELLISON -
…and yet I am what they think I am.
RALPH ELLISON -
What 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 ELLISON -
Commercial rock ‘n’ roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression.
RALPH ELLISON -
Man’s hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.
RALPH ELLISON






