Perhaps 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 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 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 ELLISONIn those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
RALPH ELLISONLife is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
RALPH ELLISONI blundered into writing.
RALPH ELLISONMeaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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 ELLISONThere are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
RALPH ELLISONLight confirms my reality, gives birth to my form…without light I am not only invisible but formless as well; and to be unaware of one’s form is to live a death…the truth is the light and light is the truth.
RALPH ELLISONIf the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to bind, imprison and destroy.
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 ELLISONIt is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.
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 ELLISONThe end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
RALPH ELLISONAnd my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own.
RALPH ELLISONMy hole is warm and full of light.
RALPH ELLISON