Quote

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

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
Individual
Patterns
Living
Chaos
Wells
Plan
Well
Sight
Must
Plans
Conceived
Mind
Lose
Societies
Never
Goes
Pattern
Loses
Individuals

More quotes by 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
The clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.
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
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
Image
And I knew that it was better to live out one's absurdity than to die for that of others.
Ralph Ellison
Image
Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself out of those values.
Ralph Ellison
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
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
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
Image
Power doesn't have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it.
Ralph Ellison
Image
If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to bind, imprison and destroy.
Ralph Ellison
Image
There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
Ralph Ellison
Image
Education is all a matter of building bridges.
Ralph Ellison
Image
That which we remember is, more often than not, that which we would like to have been or that which we hope to be. Thus our memory and our identity are ever at odds our history ever a tale told by inattentive idealists.
Ralph Ellison
Image
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
Image
What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?
Ralph Ellison
Image
The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
Ralph Ellison
Image
It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.
Ralph Ellison