God is love, I said, but art’s the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.
RALPH ELLISON
And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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God is love, I said, but art’s the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.
RALPH ELLISON -
I 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 ELLISON -
There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
RALPH ELLISON -
It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
RALPH ELLISON -
That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
RALPH ELLISON -
When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
RALPH ELLISON -
We 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 -
I remember that I’m invisible and walk softly so as not awake the sleeping ones. Sometimes it is best not to awaken them; there are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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 -
The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
RALPH ELLISON -
I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms.
RALPH ELLISON -
When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
RALPH ELLISON -
And the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived. That goes for societies as well as for individuals.
RALPH ELLISON -
My hole is warm and full of light.
RALPH ELLISON -
I suspect that all the agony that goes into writing is borne precisely because the writer longs for acceptance-but it must be acceptance on his own terms.
RALPH ELLISON