I blundered into writing.
RALPH ELLISONWhen American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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I denounce because though implicated and partially responsible, I have been hurt to the point of abysmal pain, hurt to the point of invisibility. And I defend because in spite of it all, I find that I love.
RALPH ELLISON -
…and yet I am what they think I am.
RALPH ELLISON -
Power, for the writer….lies in his ability to reveal if only a little bit more about the complexity of humanity.
RALPH ELLISON -
I am one of the most irresponsible beings that ever lived. Irresponsibility is part of my invisibility; any way you face it, it is a denial. But to whom can I be responsible, and why should I be, when you refuse to see me?
RALPH ELLISON -
Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
RALPH ELLISON -
And 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 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 -
The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
RALPH ELLISON -
Education is all a matter of building bridges.
RALPH ELLISON -
The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
RALPH ELLISON -
The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
RALPH ELLISON -
We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
RALPH ELLISON -
I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
RALPH ELLISON -
If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to bind, imprison and destroy.
RALPH ELLISON -
America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
RALPH ELLISON