If only all the contradictory voices shouting in my head would calm down and sing a song in unison, whatever it was I wouldn’t care as long as they sang without dissonance.
RALPH ELLISONIn order to travel far you have to be detached.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
-
-
…and yet I am what they think I am.
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 -
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 -
I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
RALPH ELLISON -
My hole is warm and full of light.
RALPH ELLISON -
All 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 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 -
Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
RALPH ELLISON -
The world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.
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 -
Having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge.
RALPH ELLISON -
And I knew that it was better to live out one’s absurdity than to die for that of others.
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 -
That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
RALPH ELLISON -
In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
RALPH ELLISON