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 ELLISONIt took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
-
-
And I knew that it was better to live out one’s absurdity than to die for that of others.
RALPH ELLISON -
I suspect that all the agony that goes into writing is borne precisely because the writer longs for acceptance-but it must be acceptance on his own terms.
RALPH ELLISON -
We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
RALPH ELLISON -
I 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 ELLISON -
Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
RALPH ELLISON -
Power, for the writer….lies in his ability to reveal if only a little bit more about the complexity of humanity.
RALPH ELLISON -
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.
RALPH ELLISON -
The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
RALPH ELLISON -
Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
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 -
America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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 -
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 -
Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
RALPH ELLISON -
I blundered into writing.
RALPH ELLISON