Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Feels
Reaffirm
Needs
Territory
Things
Unhappy
Loved
Part
Need
Whole
Feel

More quotes by Ralph Ellison

Image
It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.
Ralph Ellison
Image
And I knew that it was better to live out one's absurdity than to die for that of others.
Ralph Ellison
Image
Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
Ralph Ellison
Image
The world is a possibility if only you'll discover it.
Ralph Ellison
Image
The clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.
Ralph Ellison
Image
Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
Ralph Ellison
Image
I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves or figments of their imagination, indeed, everything and anything except me.
Ralph Ellison
Image
I am nobody but myself.
Ralph Ellison
Image
All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
Ralph Ellison
Image
I remember that I'm invisible and walk softly so as not awake the sleeping ones. Sometimes it is best not to awaken them there are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
Ralph Ellison
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
Ralph Ellison
Image
In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
Ralph Ellison
Image
I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
Ralph Ellison
Image
Power, for the writer....lies in his ability to reveal if only a little bit more about the complexity of humanity.
Ralph Ellison
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Education is all a matter of building bridges.
Ralph Ellison
Image
There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
Ralph Ellison