For, like almost everyone else in our country, I started out with my share of optimism. I believed in hard work and progress and action, but now, after first being 'for' society and then 'against' it, I assign myself no… — Ralph Ellison Copy Share
“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 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… — 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 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 hoax, or a contradiction, but that (by contradiction, I mean) is how the world moves: not like an arrow, but a boomerang. (Beware of those who speak of the spiral of history; they are preparing a… — Ralph Ellison Copy Share
