Famous quotes

Quotes by famous people, credited to who said them. Your own quotes must not match any of these. More are added all the time. 1,158,269 quotes Who coined it · How we decide

English Italiano Polski עברית Français Português فارسی Español 中文 Русский Deutsch العربية हिन्दी 日本語 Ελληνικά Latina

Ralph Ellison

73 quotes

“So she doesn't think Iʼm black enough. What does she want, a black-face comedian? [...] Maybe she wants to see me sweat coal tar, ink, shoe polish, graphite. What was I, a man or a natural resource?”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) said by 1994 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) said by 1994 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And yet I am what they think I am.”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) said by 1994 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For now I had begun to believe, despite all the talk of science around me, that there was a magic in spoken words.”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) said by 1994 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) said by 1994 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Everywhere I've turned somebody has wanted to sacrifice me for my good—only they were the ones who benefited. And now we start on the old sacrificial merry-go-round. At what point do we stop?”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) said by 1994 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“They were very much the same, each attempting to force his picture of reality upon me and neither giving a hoot in hell for how things looked to me.”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) said by 1994 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And I knew that it was better to live out one's own absurdity than to die for that of others.”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) said by 1994 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]he world is just as concrete, ornery, vile, and sublimely wonderful as before, only now I better understand my relation to it and it to me.”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) said by 1994 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Whence all this passion toward conformity anyway?—diversity is the word.”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) said by 1994 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 our country or of any country. Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat. Our fate is to become one, and yet many— This is not prophecy, but description.”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) said by 1994 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sometimes I feel the need to reaffirm all of it, the whole unhappy territory and all the things loved and unlovable in it, for all of it is part of me.”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) said by 1994 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled "File and forget.”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) said by 1994 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 I defend because in spite of all I find that I love. In order to get some of it down I have to love. I sell you no phony forgiveness, I'm a desperate man—but too much of your life will be lost, its meaning lost, unless you approach it as much through love as through hate. So I approach it through division. So I denounce and I defend and I hate and I love.”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) said by 1994 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived. That goes for societies as well as for individuals.”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) said by 1994 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) said by 1994 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Words are everything and don't you forget it, ever.”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) said by 1994 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) said by 1994 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 through his outer eye and through the touch and feel of his natural hand.”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) said by 1994 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...the way we talk...you know that our people like to talk around a subject even when there's no danger. They enjoy it, and if they know you well enough they're apt to leave their true subject unstated so you'll have to supply the missing meaning.”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) said by 1994 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“God is love, I said, but art's the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) said by 1994 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Perhaps the novel evolved in order to deal with man's growing awareness that behind the facade of social organisations, manners, customs, myths, rituals and religions of the post-Christian era lies chaos. Man knows, despite the certainties which it is the psychological function of his social institutions to give him, that he did not create the universe, and that the universe is not at all concerned with human values. Man knows that even in this day of marvelous technology and the tenuous subjugation of the atom, that nature can crush him, and that at the boundaries of human order the arts and the instruments of technology are hardly more than magic objects which serve to aid us in our ceaseless quest for certainty. We cannot live, as someone has said, in the contemplation of chaos, but neither can we live without an awareness of chaos, and the means through which we achieve that awareness, and through which we assert our humanity most significantly against it, is in great art. In our time the most articulate art form for defining ourselves and for asserting our humanity is the novel. Certainly it is our most rational art form for dealing with the irrational.”
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), pp. 699-700.
“On his deathbed he called my father to him and said, "Son, after I'm gone I want you to keep up the good fight. I never told you, but our life is a war and I have been a traitor all my born days, a spy in the enemy’s country ever since I give up my gun back in the Reconstruction. Live with your head in the lion’s mouth. I want you to overcome 'em with yeses, undermine 'em with grins, agree 'em to death and destruction, let 'em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open." They thought the old man had gone out of his mind. He had been the meekest of men. The younger children were rushed from the room, the shades drawn and the flame of the lamp turned so low that it spouttered on the wick like the old man's breathing. "Learn it to the younsters," he whisdpered fiercely; then he died.”
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) said by 1994 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source