When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
RALPH ELLISONWhen American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
RALPH ELLISONThe world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.
RALPH ELLISONWho knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
RALPH ELLISONMeaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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 ELLISONEclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.
RALPH ELLISON…and yet I am what they think I am.
RALPH ELLISONAnd 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 ELLISONIt took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself.
RALPH ELLISONThat … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
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 ELLISONPerhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.
RALPH ELLISONI do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
RALPH ELLISONThe thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
RALPH ELLISONWithout the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
RALPH ELLISONWe 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.
RALPH ELLISON