Ralph Ellison - Shadow and Act (1964)

13 Sourced Quotes

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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
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
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 failings.

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

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

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

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

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

Ralph Ellison
The blues is an impulse to keep the 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.

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

Ralph Ellison