Quote

All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.

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
Minorities
Novels
Novel
Individual
Certain
Minority

More quotes by Ralph Ellison

Image
When I discover who I am, I'll be free.
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
Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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
And I knew that it was better to live out one's absurdity than to die for that of others.
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
Man's hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.
Ralph Ellison
Image
I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
Ralph Ellison
Image
Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled 'file and forget.'
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
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
It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.
Ralph Ellison
Image
Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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
Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
Ralph Ellison
Image
...and yet I am what they think I am.
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
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
Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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