Life 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 ELLISONIf social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
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The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
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Having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge.
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Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.
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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
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God is love, I said, but art’s the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.
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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.
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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.
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I 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.
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And I knew that it was better to live out one’s absurdity than to die for that of others.
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I’m not a separatist. The imagination is integrative. That’s how you make the new — by putting something else with what you’ve got. And I’m unashamedly an American integrationist.
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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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…and yet I am what they think I am.
RALPH ELLISON