Ralph Ellison Quotes
Top 96 wise famous quotes and sayings by Ralph Ellison
Ralph Ellison Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from Ralph Ellison on Wise Famous Quotes.
The clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.
It was unbelievable, but perhaps only the unbelievable could be believed. Perhaps the truth was always a lie.
Running from the birds to what, I didn't know. I ran. Why was I here at all? I ran through the night, ran within myself. Ran.
An illusion was creating a counter-illusion. Where would it end? Did they believe their own propaganda? Afterwards
Nothing ever stops; it divides and multiplies, and I guess sometimes it gets ground down superfine, but it doesn't just blow away.
Power, for the writer ... .lies in his ability to reveal if only a little bit more about the complexity of humanity.
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?
I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
Nothing, storm or flood, must get in the way of our need for light and ever more and brighter light. The truth is the light and light is the truth.
Words are your business, boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock, the answer to the question.
His name was Clifton and he was black and they shot him. Isn't that enough to tell? Isn't it all you need to know?
Having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge.
The understanding of art depends finally upon one's willingness to extend one's humanity and one's knowledge of human life.
But live you must, and you can either make passive love to your sickness or burn it out and go on to the next conflicting phase.
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.
And in order for the Negro to fulfill his duty as a citizen it was often necessary that he fight for his self-affirmed right to fight.
And 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.
The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
too much of your life will be lost, its meaning lost, unless you approach it as much through love as through hate.
I'd been so fascinated by the notion, that I'd forgotten to measure what it was bringing forth. I'd been asleep, dreaming.
For their most innocent words were acts of violence to which we of the campus were hypersensitive though we endured them not.
But on the other hand, it would be a great mistake to assume that the dead are absolutely powerless.
All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was.
Man's hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.
The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
because what is commonly assumed to be past history is actually as much a part of the living present as William Faulkner insisted.
It's the little things that find us out, the little things we refuse to do in order to avoid doing the big things that can save us.
I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed.
while fiction is but a form of symbolic action, a mere game of "as if," therein lies its true function and its potential for effecting change.
Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.
For now I had begun to believe, despite all the talk of science around me, that there was a magic in spoken words.
In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
They were very much the same, each attempting to force his picture of reality upon me and neither giving a hoot in hell for how things looked to me.
they could talk and agree with themselves, the world was nailed down, and they loved it. They received a feeling of security.
Tell them to teach them that when they call you nigger to make a rhyme with trigger it makes the gun backfire
To see around corners is enough (that is not unusual when you are invisible). But to hear around them is too much; it inhibits action.
If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to blind, imprison, and destroy.
All dreamers and sleepwalkers must pay the price, and even the invisible victim is responsible for the fate of all.
All boundaries down, freedom was not only the recognition of necessity, it was the recognition of possibility.
Beware of those who speak of the spiral of history; they are preparing a boomerang. Keep a steel helmet handy
Commercial rock 'n' roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression.