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
If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to bind, imprison and destroy.
Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
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.
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?
My hole is warm and full of light.
Our task, then always, is to challenge the apparent forms of reality-that is, the fixed manner and values of the few, and to struggle with it until it reveals its mad, vari-implicated chaos, its false face, and so on until it surrenders its insight, its truth.
The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
Commercial rock 'n' roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression.
To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
That ... is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
I am nobody but myself.
When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.