I blundered into writing. Ralph Ellison More Quotes by Ralph Ellison More Quotes From Ralph Ellison 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 chaospatternsgiving All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority. Ralph Ellison individualminoritiescertain Many of the rites of passage, those rituals of growing up found in our society, are in the form of such comic, practical joking affairs--which we ignore in the belief that they possess no deeper significance. Yet it is precisely in their being regarded as unimportant that they take on importance. For in them we ritualize and dramatize attitudes which contradict and often embarrass the sacred values which we proclaim through our solemn ceremonies and rituals of nationhood. Ralph Ellison our-societygrowing-upattitude If only all the contradictory voices shouting in my head would calm down and sing a song in unison, whatever it was I wouldn't care as long as they sang without dissonance. Ralph Ellison voicesonglong ...and yet I am what they think I am. Ralph Ellison thinking I felt that even when they were polite they hardly saw me, that they would have begged the pardon of Jack the Bear, never glancing his way if the bear happened to be walking along minding his business. It was confusing. I did not know if it was desirable or undesirable. Ralph Ellison sawsconfusingbusiness In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live. Ralph Ellison diesnoise Commercial rock 'n' roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression. Ralph Ellison rocksmusicexpression When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical. Ralph Ellison american-lifetheatricallife-is 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 patternssightmind 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 laughtergayair Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action. Ralph Ellison hibernationdefinitionspreparation 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. Ralph Ellison realdreambelieve I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. Ralph Ellison invisiblehollywoodmen If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to blind, imprison, and destroy. Ralph Ellison usfreeblindpower
