Ralph Ellison Quotes

We don’t all dig Shakespeare uniformly, or even ‘Little Red Riding Hood.’ The understanding of art depends finally upon one’s willingness to extend one’s humanity and one’s knowledge of human life.

Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.

Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.

If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to bind, imprison and destroy.

Education is all a matter of building bridges.

I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.

I’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.

And 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.