I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
RALPH ELLISONYou start Saul, and end up Paul,’ my grandfather had often said. ‘When you’re a youngun, you Saul, but let life whup your head a bit and you starts to trying to be Paul – though you still Sauls around on the side.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
-
-
Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
RALPH ELLISON -
When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
RALPH ELLISON -
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 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 -
I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
RALPH ELLISON -
Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
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 -
There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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 -
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 -
In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
RALPH ELLISON -
The world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.
RALPH ELLISON -
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 -
Power 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 ELLISON