I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
RALPH ELLISONEducation is all a matter of building bridges.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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Power, for the writer….lies in his ability to reveal if only a little bit more about the complexity of humanity.
RALPH ELLISON -
I am one of the most irresponsible beings that ever lived. Irresponsibility is part of my invisibility; any way you face it, it is a denial. But to whom can I be responsible, and why should I be, when you refuse to see me?
RALPH ELLISON -
Education is all a matter of building bridges.
RALPH ELLISON -
All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
RALPH ELLISON -
The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
RALPH ELLISON -
If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?
RALPH ELLISON -
Having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge.
RALPH ELLISON -
If 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 ELLISON -
I 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 ELLISON -
And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own.
RALPH ELLISON -
Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
RALPH ELLISON -
Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
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 -
I 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 ELLISON -
Power doesn’t have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it.
RALPH ELLISON