Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
RALPH ELLISONLife is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
RALPH ELLISONTo hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
RALPH ELLISONThe clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.
RALPH ELLISONAll novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
RALPH ELLISONMeaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
RALPH ELLISONI was never more hated than when I tried to be honest. Or when, even as just now I’ve tried to articulate exactly what I felt to be the truth. No one was satisfied
RALPH ELLISONI am an invisible man. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids – and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
RALPH ELLISONAmerica is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
RALPH ELLISONIt takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
RALPH ELLISONEclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.
RALPH ELLISONCommercial rock ‘n’ roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression.
RALPH ELLISONI 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 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?
RALPH ELLISONThe thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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.
RALPH ELLISONThe blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstances, whether created by others or by one’s own human failing.
RALPH ELLISON