To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
RALPH ELLISONRelated Topics

To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
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 ELLISONIn order to travel far you have to be detached.
RALPH ELLISONPower doesn’t have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it.
RALPH ELLISONThe world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.
RALPH ELLISONWhen American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
RALPH ELLISONPower, for the writer….lies in his ability to reveal if only a little bit more about the complexity of humanity.
RALPH ELLISONThe truth is the light and the light is the truth.
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 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 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 ELLISONAll novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
RALPH ELLISONWithout the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
RALPH ELLISONI 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 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 ELLISON