Absurdity Quote by Ralph Ellison

““I am standing puzzled, unable to decide whether the veil is really being lifted, or lowered more firmly in place; whether I am witnessing a revelation or a more efficient blinding.””

Ralph Ellison

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ 3.0 out of 5 (9 ratings)

Absurdity Existential Race

More by Ralph Ellison

“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

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

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

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

Image

Power, for the writer....lies in his ability to reveal if only a little bit more about the complexity of humanity.

Ralph Ellison

Image

...and yet I am what they think I am.

Ralph Ellison

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

Image

“Do they come to bury the others or to be entombed to give life or to receive it?”

Ralph Ellison

Image

“They could laugh at him but they couldn't ignore him”

Ralph Ellison

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

Image

“All dreamers and sleepwalkers must pay the price, and even the invisible victim is responsible for the fate of all.”

Ralph Ellison

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

Image

Explore all 154 Ralph Ellison quotes

More Absurdity quotes

Even though you can't expect to defeat the absurdity of the world, you must make that attempt. That's morality, that's religion. That's art. That's…

Phil Ochs

Image

The inner defenses are unconscious. They consist of a kind of magic aura which the mind builds around cherished belief. Arguments which penetrate into…

Arthur Koestler

Image

For it is an absurdity to call a country civilized in which a decent and industrious man, laboriously mastering a trade which is valuble…

H. L. Mencken

Image

Every sensible man, every honorable man, must hold the Christian sect in horror." "Christianity is the most ridiculous, the most absurd and bloody religion…

Voltaire

Image

One would think that a system loaded with such gross and vulgar absurdities as Scripture religion is could never have obtained credit; yet we…

Thomas Paine

Image

Such squeamish youths as cannot bear to be connected with a little absurdity are not worth a regret.

Jane Austen

Image

Thought of the incomprehensible sequence of changes and chances that make up a life, all the beauties and horrors and absurdities whose conjunctions create…

Aldous Huxley