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 ELLISONIf 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 ELLISONWe look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
RALPH ELLISONI 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 ELLISONWords are your business, boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock, the answer to the question.
RALPH ELLISONIf social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?
RALPH ELLISONAmerica is woven of many strands. I would recognise them and let it so remain. Our fate is to become one, and yet many. This is not prophecy, but description.
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 ELLISONThe act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
RALPH ELLISONAll novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
RALPH ELLISONLife 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 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 ELLISONIt takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
RALPH ELLISONIt is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.
RALPH ELLISONInjustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
RALPH ELLISONThe truth is the light and the light is the truth.
RALPH ELLISONI suspect that all the agony that goes into writing is borne precisely because the writer longs for acceptance-but it must be acceptance on his own terms.
RALPH ELLISON