Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.
RALPH ELLISONPerhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.
RALPH ELLISONIt is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.
RALPH ELLISONIt takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
RALPH ELLISONI am nobody but myself.
RALPH ELLISONThe clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.
RALPH ELLISONLife is as the sea, art a ship in which man conquers life’s crushing formlessness, reducing it to a course, a series of swells, tides and wind currents inscribed on a chart.
RALPH ELLISONAnd the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived. That goes for societies as well as for individuals.
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 ELLISONIf the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to bind, imprison and destroy.
RALPH ELLISONPower 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 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 ELLISONPower, for the writer….lies in his ability to reveal if only a little bit more about the complexity of humanity.
RALPH ELLISONAmerica is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
RALPH ELLISONI 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 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 ELLISONThe thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
RALPH ELLISON