Ralph Ellison quotes - page 2

The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy, but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically. (Ralph Ellison)
God is love, I said, but art's the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity. View quote
Ralph Ellison
I recall the sudden arpeggios of laughter lilting across the tender, springtime grass - gay-welling, far-floating, fluent, spontaneous, a bell-like feminine fluting, then suppressed; as though snuffed swiftly and irrevocably beneath the quiet solemnity of the vespered air now vibrant with somber chapel bells. View quote
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. View quote
Ralph Ellison
And yet I am what they think I am. View quote
Ralph Ellison
The clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled. View quote
Ralph Ellison
...to hell with being ashamed of what you liked. View quote
Ralph Ellison
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? View quote
Ralph Ellison
Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you? View quote
Ralph Ellison
I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers. View quote
Ralph Ellison
Our task then is always to challenge the apparent forms of reality-that is, the fixed meaning and values of the few-and to struggle with it until it reveals its mad, vari-implicated chaos, its false faces, and on until it surrenders its insight, its truth. (Ralph Ellison)
If you can show me how I can cling to that which is real to me, while teaching me a way into the larger society, then I will not only drop my defenses and my hostility, but I will sing your praises and help you to make the desert bear fruit. View quote
Ralph Ellison
But what a feeling can come over a man just from seeing the things he believes in and hopes for symbolized in the concrete form of a man. In something that gives a focus to all the other things he knows to be real. Something that makes unseen things manifest and allows him to come to his hopes and dreams through his outer eye and through the touch and feel of his natural hand. View quote
Ralph Ellison
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. View quote
Ralph Ellison
Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself. View quote
Ralph Ellison
...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. View quote
Ralph Ellison
Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled "File and forget." View quote
Ralph Ellison
It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves. View quote
Ralph Ellison
Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains. View quote
Ralph Ellison
When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical. View quote
Ralph Ellison
Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty. (Ralph Ellison)
Life 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. View quote
Ralph Ellison
All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority. The universal in the novel-and isn't that what we're all clamoring for these days?-is reached only through the depiction of the specific man in a specific circumstance. View quote
Ralph Ellison
The truth is the light and light is the truth. View quote
Ralph Ellison
America is woven of many strands; I would recognize them and let it so remain. It's "winner take nothing" that is the great truth of our country or of any country. Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat. Our fate is to become one, and yet many- This is not prophecy, but description. View quote
Ralph Ellison