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Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
Ralph Ellison
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Ralph Ellison
Age: 80 †
Born: 1914
Born: March 1
Died: 1994
Died: April 16
Autobiographer
Critic
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Literary Scholar
Music Critic
Novelist
Prosaist
Writer
Oklahoma City
Oklahoma
Ralph Waldo Ellison
Reality
Defeat
Certain
Inspiring
Play
Lived
Life
Failure
Humanity
Scholar
Winning
Continuing
Face
Novelists
Faces
Controlled
More quotes by Ralph Ellison
I suspect that all the agony that goes into writing is borne precisely because the writer longs for acceptance-but it must be acceptance on his own terms.
Ralph Ellison
There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
Ralph Ellison
Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
Ralph Ellison
It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.
Ralph Ellison
Perhaps everyone loved someone I didn't now, I couldn't give much thought to love in order to travel far you had to be detached, and I had the long road back to the campus before me.
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
When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
Ralph Ellison
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
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 it all, I find that I love.
Ralph Ellison
Having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge.
Ralph Ellison
Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled 'file and forget.'
Ralph Ellison
America is woven of many strands. I would recognise them and let it so remain. Our fate is to become one, and yet many. This is not prophecy, but description.
Ralph Ellison
We don't all dig Shakespeare uniformly, or even 'Little Red Riding Hood.' The understanding of art depends finally upon one's willingness to extend one's humanity and one's knowledge of human life.
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
Light confirms my reality, gives birth to my form...without light I am not only invisible but formless as well and to be unaware of one's form is to live a death...the truth is the light and light is the truth.
Ralph Ellison
I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed.
Ralph Ellison
I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
Ralph Ellison
When I discover who I am, I'll be free.
Ralph Ellison
Without involvement, there is no commitment. Mark it down, asterisk it, circle it, underline it. Stephen Covey It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
Ralph Ellison
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