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Ralph Ellison
73 quotes
“[T]he painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy, but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) first seen 1945 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Richard Wright's Blues" (1945), in The Collected Essays, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1995), p. 129.
“Life is as the sea, art a ship in which man conquers life's crushing formlessness, reducing it to a course, a series of swells, tides and wind currents inscribed on a chart.”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) first seen 1945 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Richard Wright's Blues" (1945), in The Collected Essays, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1995), p. 133.
“Perhaps the most insidious and least understood form of segregation is that of the word.[…] For if the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to blind, imprison and destroy.”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) first seen 1953 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity" (1953), in The Collected Essays, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1995), p. 81.
“[T]here must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientist, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale.”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) first seen 1953 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Brave Words for a Startling Occasion" (1953), in The Collected Essays, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1995), p. 153.
“Our task then is always to challenge the apparent forms of reality—that is, the fixed meaning and values of the few—and to struggle with it until it reveals its mad, vari-implicated chaos, its false faces, and on until it surrenders its insight, its truth.”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) first seen 1953 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Brave Words for a Startling Occasion" (1953), in The Collected Essays, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1995), p. 154.
“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 reached only through the depiction of the specific man in a specific circumstance.”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) first seen 1955 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Art of Fiction: An Interview" (The Paris Review, Spring 1955), in The Collected Essays, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1995), p. 212.
“The understanding of art depends finally upon one's willingness to extend one's humanity and one's knowledge of human life.”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) first seen 1955 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Art of Fiction: An Interview" (The Paris Review, Spring 1955), in The Collected Essays, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1995), p. 217.
“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 to have it affirmed by others is of utmost importance. Writing is, after all, a form of communication.”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) first seen 1955 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Art of Fiction: An Interview" (The Paris Review, Spring 1955), in The Collected Essays, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1995), p. 218.
“Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty.”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) first seen 1957 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Society, Morality and the Novel" (1957), in The Collected Essays, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1995), p. 699.
“Closed societies are now the flimsiest of illusions, for all the outsiders are demanding in.”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) first seen 1957 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Society, Morality and the Novel" (1957), in The Collected Essays, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1995), p. 726.
“Deep at the dark bottom of the melting pot, where the private is public and the public private, where black is white and white black, where the immoral becomes moral and the moral is anything that makes one feel good (or that one has the power to sustain), the white man's relish is apt to be the black man's gall.”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) first seen 1955 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke" (1958), in The Collected Essays, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1955), p. 104.
“When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) first seen 1958 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke" (1958), in The Collected Essays, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1995), p. 108.
“The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstances, whether created by others or by one's own human failing.”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) first seen 1958 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Remembering Jimmy" (1958), in The Collected Essays, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1995), p. 277.
“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 (1914–1994) first seen 1958 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Some Questions and Some Answers" (1958), in The Collected Essays, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1995), p. 298.
“At best Americans give but limited attention to history. Too much happens too rapidly, and before we can evaluate it, or exhaust its meaning or pleasure, there is something new to concern us. Ours is the tempo of the motion picture, not that of the still camera, and we waste experience as we wasted the forest.”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) first seen 1959 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Golden Age, Time Past" (1959), in The Collected Essays, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1995), p. 239.
“Let's not play these kids cheap; let's find out what they have that is a strength. What do they have that you can approach and build a bridge upon? Education is all a matter of building bridges, it seems to me.”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) first seen 1963 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: What These Children Are Like" (1963), in The Collected Essays, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1995), p. 548.
“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, then I will not only drop my defenses and my hostility, but I will sing your praises and help you to make the desert bear fruit.”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) first seen 1963 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: What These Children Are Like" (1963), in The Collected Essays, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1995), p. 555.
“Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) first seen 1964 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Shadow and Act (New York: Random House, 1964), Introduction, p. xix; in The Collected Essays, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1995), p. 56.
“The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) first seen 1964 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Shadow and Act (New York: Random House, 1964), Introduction, p. xix; in The Collected Essays, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1995), p. 56.
“Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) first seen 1964 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: If the Twain Shall Meet" (1964), in The Collected Essays, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1995), p. 569.
“Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself out of those values.”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) first seen 1964 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Time magazine (27 March 1964).
“I am a novelist, not an activist... But I think that no one who reads what I write or who listens to my lectures can doubt that I am enlisted in the freedom movement. As an individual, I am primarily responsible for the health of American literature and culture. When I write, I am trying to make sense out of chaos. To think that a writer must think about his Negroness is to fall into a trap.”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) first seen 1966 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in "An American Novelist Who Sometimes Teaches" by John Corry in The New York Times (20 November 1966).
“[R]emember that the antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize clear ideas. Or as Emerson insisted, the development of consciousness, consciousness, consciousness. And with consciousness a more refined conscientiousness, and most of all, that tolerance which takes the form of humor, for when Americans can no longer laugh at each other, they have to fight one another.”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) first seen 1949 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Address to the Harvard College Alumni, Class of 1949" (1974), in The Collected Essays, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1995), p. 429.
“The work of art is, after all, an act of faith in our ability to communicate symbolically.”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) first seen 1978 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Little Man at Chehaw Station" (1978), in The Collected Essays, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1995), p. 503.
“Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) first seen 1978 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Essential Ellison", interview by Ishmael Reed in Y'Bird 1, no. 1 (1978): 130-59.
“I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me.”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) said by 1994 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) said by 1994 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It's when you feel like this that, out of resentment, you begin to bump people back. And, let me confess, you feel that way most of the time. You ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world, that you're a part of all the sound and anguish, and you strike out with your fists, you curse and you swear to make them recognize you. And, alas, it's seldom successful.”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) said by 1994 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]here are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) said by 1994 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]he end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) said by 1994 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The truth is the light and light is the truth.”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) said by 1994 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) said by 1994 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 denial. But to whom can I be responsible, and why should I be, when you refuse to see me? And wait until I reveal how truly irresponsible I am. Responsibility rests upon recognition, and recognition is a form of agreement.”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) said by 1994 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naïve. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. 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: That I am nobody but myself.”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) said by 1994 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time been ashamed.”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) said by 1994 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) said by 1994 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Y]ou both fail to understand what is happening to you. You cannot see or hear or smell the truth of what you see — and you, looking for destiny! It’s classic! And the boy, this automaton, he was made of the very mud of the region and sees far less than you. Poor stumblers, neither of you can see the other. To you he is a mark on the score-card of your achievement, a thing and not a man; a child, or even less — a black, amorphous thing. And you, for all your power, are not a man to him, but a God, a force...”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) said by 1994 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I recall the sudden 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 swiftly and irrevocably beneath the quiet solemnity of the vespered air now vibrant with somber chapel bells.”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) said by 1994 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Man's hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or a moaning dove.”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) said by 1994 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Power doesn't have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it.”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) said by 1994 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Play the game, but don't believe in it.”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) said by 1994 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]here's always an element of crime in freedom.”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) said by 1994 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]he world is possibility if only you'll discover it.”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) said by 1994 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Perhaps everyone loved someone; I didn't know, I couldn't give much thought to love; in order to travel far you had to be detached, and I had a long road back to the campus before me.”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) said by 1994 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But we are all human, I thought, wondering what I meant.”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) said by 1994 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When I discover who I am, I'll be free.”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) said by 1994 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If only all the contradictory voices shouting inside my head would calm down and sing a song in unison, whatever it was I wouldn't care so long as they sang without dissonance.”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) said by 1994 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 northern winter had set.”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) said by 1994 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]o hell with being ashamed of what you liked.”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) said by 1994 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) said by 1994 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source