Ralph Ellison
Ralph Ellison
Ralph Waldo Ellisonwas an American novelist, literary critic, and scholar. He was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Ellison is best known for his novel Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award in 1953. He also wrote Shadow and Act, a collection of political, social and critical essays, and Going to the Territory. For The New York Times, the best of these essays in addition to the novel put him "among the gods of America's literary Parnassus." A posthumous novel,...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth1 March 1914
CityOklahoma City, OK
CountryUnited States of America
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.
In order to travel far you have to be detached.
Whence all this passion towards conformity anyway? Diversity is the word. Let man keep his many parts and you will have no tyrant states. Why, if they follow this conformity business, they'll end up by forcing me, an invisible man, to become white, which is not a color but the lack of one. Must I strive towards colorlessness? But seriously and without snobbery, think of what the world would lose if that should happen. America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to bind, imprison and destroy.
In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
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.
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.
Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
But what a feeling can come over a man just from seeing the things he believes in and hopes for symbolized in the concrete form of a man. In something that gives a focus to all the other things he knows to be real. Something that makes unseen things manifest and allows him to come to his hopes and dreams through his outer eye and through the touch and feel of his natural hand.
It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.
I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
Imitation is suicide, envy is ignorance.
All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
Hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.