Quote

I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.

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
Individuality
Questions
Asking
Except
Answer
Answers
Looking
Everyone
Contradictory

More quotes by 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
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
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
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
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
Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
Ralph Ellison
Image
Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
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
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
The world is a possibility if only you'll discover it.
Ralph Ellison
Image
There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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
Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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
I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
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
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
All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
Ralph Ellison
Image
When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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