The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike. — Ralph Ellison Copy Share Image
“Come out of the fog, young man. And remember you don't have to be a complete fool in order to succeed. Play… — Ralph Ellison Copy Share Image
The clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled. — Ralph Ellison Copy Share Image
“During these times of indecision when all the old answers are proven false, the people look back to the dead to give… — Ralph Ellison Copy Share Image
“...she was something more- a force, a stable, familiar force like something out of my past which kept me from whirling off… — Ralph Ellison Copy Share Image
It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have… — 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
