Ralph Ellison Quotes

69 Sourced Quotes

The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.

Ralph Ellison
Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?

Ralph Ellison
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
God is love, I said, but art's the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.

Ralph Ellison
And I knew that it was better to live out one's absurdity than to die for that of others.

Ralph Ellison
When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.

Ralph Ellison
If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to bind, imprison and destroy.

Ralph Ellison
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
At best Americans give but a 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