Ralph Ellison quotes - page 4

...you both fail to understand what is happening to you. You cannot see or hear or smell the truth of what you see - and you, looking for destiny! It's classic! And the boy, this automaton, he was made of the very mud of the region and sees far less than you. Poor stumblers, neither of you can see the other. To you he is a mark on the score-card of your achievement, a thing and not a man; a child, or even less - a black, amorphous thing. And you, for all your power, are not a man to him, but a God, a force... (Ralph Ellison)
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 all I find that I love. In order to get some of it down I have to love. I sell you no phony forgiveness, I'm a desperate man-but too much of your life will be lost, its meaning lost, unless you approach it as much through love as through hate. So I approach it through division. So I denounce and I defend and I hate and I love. View quote
Ralph Ellison
They could laugh at him but they couldn't ignore him. View quote
Ralph Ellison
Perhaps the novel evolved in order to deal with man's growing awareness that behind the facade of social organisations, manners, customs, myths, rituals and religions of the post-Christian era lies chaos. View quote
Ralph Ellison
And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone's way but my own. View quote
Ralph Ellison
Play the game, but don't believe in it – that much you owe yourself ... Play the game, but raise the ante, my boy. Learn how it operates, learn how you operate. View quote
Ralph Ellison
I want you to overcome ‘em with yeses, undermine ‘em with grins, agree ‘em to death and destruction, let ‘em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open... View quote
Ralph Ellison
We cannot live, as someone has said, in the contemplation of chaos, but neither can we live without an awareness of chaos, and the means through which we achieve that awareness, and through which we assert our humanity most significantly against it, is in great art. In our time the most articulate art form for defining ourselves and for asserting our humanity is the novel. Certainly it is our most rational art form for dealing with the irrational. View quote
Ralph Ellison
Responsibility rests upon recognition, and recognition is a form of agreement. View quote
Ralph Ellison
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. View quote
Ralph Ellison
I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. (Ralph Ellison)
If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to bind, imprison and destroy. View quote
Ralph Ellison
On his deathbed he called my father to him and said, "Son, after I'm gone I want you to keep up the good fight. I never told you, but our life is a war and I have been a traitor all my born days, a spy in the enemy's country ever since I give up my gun back in the Reconstruction. Live with your head in the lion's mouth. I want you to overcome 'em with yeses, undermine 'em with grins, agree 'em to death and destruction, let 'em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open." They thought the old man had gone out of his mind. He had been the meekest of men. The younger children were rushed from the room, the shades drawn and the flame of the lamp turned so low that it spouttered on the wick like the old man's breathing. "Learn it to the younsters," he whisdpered fiercely; then he died. View quote
Ralph Ellison