“But what a feeling can come over a man just from seeing the things he believes in and hopes for symbolized in… — 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… — 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
Many of the rites of passage, those rituals of growing up found in our society, are in the form of such comic,… — Ralph Ellison Copy Share Image
Our task, then always, is to challenge the apparent forms of reality-that is, the fixed manner and values of the few, and… — Ralph Ellison Copy Share Image
The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to… — 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
Light confirms my reality, gives birth to my form...without light I am not only invisible but formless as well; and to be… — 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
