God is love, I said, but art's the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity. — Ralph Ellison Copy Share Image
When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical. — Ralph Ellison Copy Share Image
If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to bind, imprison and destroy. — Ralph Ellison Copy Share Image
I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. — Ralph Ellison Copy Share Image
Perhaps everyone loved someone; I didn't now, I couldn't give much thought to love; in order to travel far you had to… — Ralph Ellison Copy Share Image
“But live you must, and you can either make passive love to your sickness or burn it out and go on to… — Ralph Ellison Copy Share Image
“And I defend because in spite of all I find that I love. In order to get some of it down I… — Ralph Ellison Copy Share Image
“Civil wars...are the best wars for the writer...because they have a way of continuing long afterwl wars between nations are resolved; because, with the… — Ralph Ellison Copy Share
“But what a feeling can come over a man just from seeing the things he believes in and hopes for symbolized in the concrete… — Ralph Ellison Copy Share
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… — Ralph Ellison Copy Share
Everywhere I've turned somebody has wanted to sacrifice me for my own good—only /they/ were the ones who benefited. And now we start on… — Ralph Ellison Copy Share
Power, for the writer…lies in his ability to reveal if only a little bit more about the complexity of humanity. — Ralph Ellison Copy Share
And while the ice was melting to form a flood in which I threatened to drown I awoke one afternoon to find that my… — Ralph Ellison Copy Share
“Do they come to bury the others or to be entombed to give life or to receive it?” — Ralph Ellison Copy Share
Commercial rock 'n' roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression. — Ralph Ellison Copy Share
“All dreamers and sleepwalkers must pay the price, and even the invisible victim is responsible for the fate of all.” — Ralph Ellison Copy Share
“Those two spots are among the darkest of our whole civilization--pardon me, our whole culture (an important distinction, I've heard)--which might sound like a… — Ralph Ellison Copy Share
“Above the decorous walking around me, sounds of footsteps leaving the verandas of far-flung buildings and moving toward the walks and over the walks… — Ralph Ellison Copy Share
And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone's way but my own. — Ralph Ellison Copy Share
I am one of the most irresponsible beings that ever lived. Irresponsibility is part of my invisibility; any way you face it, it is… — Ralph Ellison Copy Share
