Man’s hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.
RALPH ELLISONWithout the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
-
-
It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
RALPH ELLISON -
Life 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 ELLISON -
Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
RALPH ELLISON -
Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty.
RALPH ELLISON -
Education is all a matter of building bridges.
RALPH ELLISON -
The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
RALPH ELLISON -
Words are your business, boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock, the answer to the question.
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 -
Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
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 -
I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
RALPH ELLISON -
That which we remember is, more often than not, that which we would like to have been; or that which we hope to be. Thus our memory and our identity are ever at odds; our history ever a tale told by inattentive idealists.
RALPH ELLISON -
the world is just as concrete, ornery, vile, and sublimely wonderful as before, only now I better understand my relation to it and it to me.
RALPH ELLISON -
Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
RALPH ELLISON -
Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
RALPH ELLISON