I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
RALPH ELLISONI was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
RALPH ELLISONIf social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?
RALPH ELLISONHad the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
RALPH ELLISONI feel the need to reaffirm all of it, the whole unhappy territory and all the things loved and unloveable in it, for it is all part of me.
RALPH ELLISONGood fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
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 ELLISONWords are your business, boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock, the answer to the question.
RALPH ELLISONSome people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself out of those values.
RALPH ELLISONIt takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
RALPH ELLISONHaving tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge.
RALPH ELLISONI blundered into writing.
RALPH ELLISONWhen I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
RALPH ELLISONThere 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 ELLISONThe end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
RALPH ELLISONAnd I knew that it was better to live out one’s absurdity than to die for that of others.
RALPH ELLISONThe antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
RALPH ELLISON