the world is just as concrete, ornery, vile, and sublimely wonderful as before, only now I better understand my relation to it and it to me.
RALPH ELLISONHad the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
-
-
Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty.
RALPH ELLISON -
In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
RALPH ELLISON -
The world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.
RALPH ELLISON -
…and yet I am what they think I am.
RALPH ELLISON -
I denounce because though implicated and partially responsible, I have been hurt to the point of abysmal pain, hurt to the point of invisibility. And I defend because in spite of it all, I find that I love.
RALPH ELLISON -
Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself out of those values.
RALPH ELLISON -
The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
RALPH ELLISON -
There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
RALPH ELLISON -
Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
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 -
Words are your business, boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock, the answer to the question.
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 -
We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
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 -
If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to bind, imprison and destroy.
RALPH ELLISON -
Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.
RALPH ELLISON -
Life 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 ELLISON -
And 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 ELLISON -
There must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientists, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale.
RALPH ELLISON -
I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed.
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 -
America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
RALPH ELLISON -
Light 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 ELLISON -
Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
RALPH ELLISON -
It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.
RALPH ELLISON -
That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
RALPH ELLISON