It 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.
RALPH ELLISONEverywhere I’ve turned somebody has wanted to sacrifice me for my own good—only /they/ were the ones who benefited. And now we start on the old sacrificial merry-go-round. At what point do we stop?
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 -
If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?
RALPH ELLISON -
Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
RALPH ELLISON -
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 ELLISON -
The clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.
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 -
It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
RALPH ELLISON -
Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
RALPH ELLISON -
You start Saul, and end up Paul,’ my grandfather had often said. ‘When you’re a youngun, you Saul, but let life whup your head a bit and you starts to trying to be Paul – though you still Sauls around on the side.
RALPH ELLISON -
All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
RALPH ELLISON -
Without involvement, there is no commitment. Mark it down, asterisk it, circle it, underline it.” Stephen Covey “It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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 -
And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own.
RALPH ELLISON -
I remember that I’m invisible and walk softly so as not awake the sleeping ones. Sometimes it is best not to awaken them; there are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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