Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.
RALPH ELLISONPerhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.
RALPH ELLISONIt takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
RALPH ELLISONWe look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
RALPH ELLISONThe truth is the light and the light is the truth.
RALPH ELLISONWords are your business, boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock, the answer to the question.
RALPH ELLISONLife is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
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.
RALPH ELLISONThe world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.
RALPH ELLISONWhat 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 ELLISONAnd my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own.
RALPH ELLISONWhen American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
RALPH ELLISONIn those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
RALPH ELLISONPerhaps everyone loved someone; I didn’t now, I couldn’t give much thought to love; in order to travel far you had to be detached, and I had the long road back to the campus before me.
RALPH ELLISONI 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 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 do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
RALPH ELLISON