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 ELLISONSome 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 ELLISONThe truth is the light and the light is the truth.
RALPH ELLISONIn order to travel far you have to be detached.
RALPH ELLISONGod is love, I said, but art’s the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.
RALPH ELLISONTo hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
RALPH ELLISONPlease, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
RALPH ELLISONIn those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
RALPH ELLISONAll novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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 ELLISONAmerica is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
RALPH ELLISONAnd my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own.
RALPH ELLISONAll novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority. The universal in the novel-and isn’t that what we’re all clamoring for these days?-is reached only through the depiction of the specific man in a specific circumstance.
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 while the ice was melting to form a flood in which I threatened to drown I awoke one afternoon to find that my first northern winter had set.
RALPH ELLISONEvery 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 ELLISONThe end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
RALPH ELLISON