All Ralph Ellison Quotes
- 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… Apparent
- It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow. Change
- 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… Asterisk
- Commercial rock 'n' roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression. Brutalization
- 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… Actually Go
- 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… Acceptance
- If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to bind, imprison and destroy. Bind
- 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… America
- 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… Afternoon
- 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… Abysmal
- 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… All
- 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… Any
- 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… Affirmed
- 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,… Bear
- The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike. Act
- If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain? Antithetical
- I blundered into writing. Blundered
- 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… All
- 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:… Achieve
- All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority. All
- To hell with being ashamed of what you liked. Ashamed
- There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers. Dangerous
- That ... is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang. Arrow
- I suddenly recall the arpeggios of laughter lilting across the tender, springtime grass-gay-welling, far-floating, fluent, spontaneous, a bell-like feminine fluting, then suppressed; as though snuffed… Across
- Having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge. Certainties