Ralph Ellison Short Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

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The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.

Ralph Ellison
I recognize no dichotomy between art and protest.

Ralph Ellison
Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.

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

Ralph Ellison
There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.

Ralph Ellison
The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.

Ralph Ellison
Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.

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

Ralph Ellison
We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.

Ralph Ellison
And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone's way but my own.

Ralph Ellison
I know of no valid demonstration that culture is transmitted through the genes.

Ralph Ellison
Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.

Ralph Ellison
Beware of those who speak of the spiral of history; they are preparing a boomerang.

Ralph Ellison
Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.

Ralph Ellison
I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.

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

Ralph Ellison
Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.

Ralph Ellison
If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?

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

Ralph Ellison
As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.

Ralph Ellison
While one can do nothing about choosing one's relatives one can, as artist, choose one's "ancestors."

Ralph Ellison
I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.

Ralph Ellison
In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.

Ralph Ellison
The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.

Ralph Ellison
Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.

Ralph Ellison
Man's hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.

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

Ralph Ellison
The clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.

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