Quote

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

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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
Course
Crush
Swells
Art
Ships
Inscribed
Men
Conquer
Conquers
Life
Currents
Chart
Series
Crushing
Sea
Reducing
Wind
Tides
Courses
Ship
Formlessness

More quotes by Ralph Ellison

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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.
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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.
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Commercial rock 'n' roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression.
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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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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
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In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
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Perhaps everyone loved someone I didn't now, I couldn't give much thought to love in order to travel far you had to be detached, and I had the long road back to the campus before me.
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Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
Ralph Ellison
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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.
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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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The clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.
Ralph Ellison
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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
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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
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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
Ralph Ellison
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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