Quote

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

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
Find
Partially
Love
Defend
Spite
Responsible
Hurt
Implicated
Though
Abysmal
Point
Denounce
Pain
Invisibility

More quotes by Ralph Ellison

Image
Life is as the sea, art a ship in which man conquers life's crushing formlessness, reducing it to a course, a series of swells, tides and wind currents inscribed on a chart.
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
When I discover who I am, I'll be free.
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
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
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
Image
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
Image
It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.
Ralph Ellison
Image
The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
Ralph Ellison
Image
I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
Ralph Ellison
Image
...and yet I am what they think I am.
Ralph Ellison
Image
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
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
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
Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled 'file and forget.'
Ralph Ellison
Image
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
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
I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
Ralph Ellison
Image
Words are your business, boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock, the answer to the question.
Ralph Ellison