Life is as the sea, art a ship in which man conquers life's crushing formlessness, reducing it to a course, a series… — Ralph Ellison Copy Share Image
The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstances, whether created by others or by… — Ralph Ellison Copy Share Image
God is love, I said, but art's the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity. — Ralph Ellison Copy Share Image
The understanding of art depends finally upon one's willingness to extend one's humanity and one's knowledge of human life. — Ralph Ellison Copy Share Image
If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain? — Ralph Ellison Copy Share Image
We don't all dig Shakespeare uniformly, or even 'Little Red Riding Hood.' The understanding of art depends finally upon one's willingness to… — Ralph Ellison Copy Share Image
The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstance whether created by others or by… — Ralph Ellison Copy Share Image
“The understanding of art depends finally upon one's willingness to extend one's humanity.” — Ralph Ellison Copy Share Image
Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with… — 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 Image
“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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
“Do they come to bury the others or to be entombed to give life or to receive it?” — Ralph Ellison Copy Share Image
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 Image
“All dreamers and sleepwalkers must pay the price, and even the invisible victim is responsible for the fate of all.” — Ralph Ellison Copy Share Image
“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 Image
