Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat. Ralph Ellison More Quotes by Ralph Ellison More Quotes From Ralph Ellison The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstances, whether created by others or by one's own human failing. Ralph Ellison failing music art Whence all this passion toward conformity anyway? – diversity is the word. Let man keep his many parts and you'll 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 toward 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. Ralph Ellison passion men thinking Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are. Ralph Ellison where-you-are losing danger Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked. Ralph Ellison dream beauty love In order to travel far you have to be detached. Ralph Ellison detached order Words are your business, boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock, the answer to the question. Ralph Ellison rocks keys boys If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to bind, imprison and destroy. Ralph Ellison potency politics political I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest. Or when, even as just now I've tried to articulate exactly what I felt to be the truth. No one was satisfied Ralph Ellison satisfied honest hated Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains. Ralph Ellison form shapes mind 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 imagination The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have. Ralph Ellison exploits things-to-do It goes a long way back, some twenty years. All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naive. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself. But first I had to discover that I am an invisible man! Ralph Ellison being-yourself inspirational men 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. Ralph Ellison mad struggle reality To hell with being ashamed of what you liked. Ralph Ellison hell ashamed You start Saul, and end up Paul,' my grandfather had often said. 'When you're a youngun, you Saul, but let life whup your head a bit and you starts to trying to be Paul - though you still Sauls around on the side. Ralph Ellison grandfather sides trying I am nobody but myself. Ralph Ellison Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by. Ralph Ellison real made fiction There must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientists, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale. Ralph Ellison fairy-stories leaving reality So why do I write, torturing myself to put it down? Because in spite of myself I've learned some things. Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled "file and forget," and I can neither file nor forget. Nor will certain ideas forget me; they keep filing away at my lethargy, my complacency. Why should I be the one to dream this nightmare? Ralph Ellison dream writing ideas The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead. Ralph Ellison beginnings-and-ends ends lying
