Ralph Ellison Quotes

85 quotes in 1150 categories

• Our task, then always, is to challenge the apparent forms of reality-that is, the fixed manner and values of the few, and to struggle with…
• It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
• Without involvement, there is no commitment. Mark it down, asterisk it, circle it, underline it." Stephen Covey "It takes a deep commitment to change and…
• Commercial rock 'n' roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression.
• The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstance whether created by others or by one's own human…
• 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 his…
• If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to bind, imprison and destroy.
• America is woven of many strands; I would recognize them and let it so remain. It's 'winner take nothing' that is the great truth of…
• And while the ice was melting to form a flood in which I threatened to drown I awoke one afternoon to find that my first…
• I denounce because though implicated and partially responsible, I have been hurt to the point of abysmal pain, hurt to the point of invisibility. And…
• We don't all dig Shakespeare uniformly, or even 'Little Red Riding Hood.' The understanding of art depends finally upon one's willingness to extend one's humanity…
• I am one of the most irresponsible beings that ever lived. Irresponsibility is part of my invisibility; any way you face it, it is a…
• By and large, the critics and readers gave me an affirmed sense of my identity as a writer. You might know this within yourself, but…
• If you can show me how I can cling to that which is real to me, while teaching me a way into the larger society,…
• The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
• If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?
• I blundered into writing.
• All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority. The universal in the novel-and isn't that what we're all clamoring for these days?-is…
• It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with:…
• All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.

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