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Words are your business, boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock, the answer to the question.
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
Words
Keys
Business
Rock
Everything
Rocks
Answer
Boys
Question
Answers
Word
More quotes by Ralph Ellison
There must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientists, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale.
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
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
The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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
When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
Ralph Ellison
Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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
It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself.
Ralph Ellison
I suddenly recall the arpeggios of laughter lilting across the tender, springtime grass-gay-welling, far-floating, fluent, spontaneous, a bell-like feminine fluting, then suppressed as though snuffed swiftly and irrevocably beneath the quiet solemnity of the vespered air now vibrant with somber chapel bells.
Ralph Ellison
Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled 'file and forget.'
Ralph Ellison
The world is a possibility if only you'll discover it.
Ralph Ellison
I'm not a separatist. The imagination is integrative. That's how you make the new -- by putting something else with what you've got. And I'm unashamedly an American integrationist.
Ralph Ellison
If you can show me how I can cling to that which is real to me, while teaching me a way into the larger society, then and only then will I drop my defenses and hostility, and I will sing your praises and help you to make the desert bear fruit.
Ralph Ellison
In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
Ralph Ellison
Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
Ralph Ellison
Everywhere I've turned somebody has wanted to sacrifice me for my own 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
I feel the need to reaffirm all of it, the whole unhappy territory and all the things loved and unloveable in it, for it is all part of me.
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
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
