Quote

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

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
Upon
Riding
Art
Willingness
Littles
Red
Little
Finally
Human
Depends
Uniformly
Humans
Humanity
Hood
Even
Understanding
Extend
Life
Knowledge
Shakespeare

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 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
Image
When I discover who I am, I'll be free.
Ralph Ellison
Image
Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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
Words are your business, boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock, the answer to the question.
Ralph Ellison
Image
Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled 'file and forget.'
Ralph Ellison
Image
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
Image
And I knew that it was better to live out one's absurdity than to die for that of others.
Ralph Ellison
Image
Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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
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
I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
Ralph Ellison
Image
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
Image
Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
Ralph Ellison
Image
The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
Ralph Ellison
Image
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
Image
The world is a possibility if only you'll discover it.
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
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