The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have. Ralph Ellison More Quotes by Ralph Ellison More Quotes From Ralph Ellison All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority. Ralph Ellison individual minorities certain I blundered into writing. Ralph Ellison writing 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-society growing-up attitude 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 voice song long ...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 saws confusing business In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live. Ralph Ellison dies noise 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 rocks music expression When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical. Ralph Ellison american-life theatrical life-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 patterns sight mind 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 laughter gay air Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action. Ralph Ellison hibernation definitions preparation 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 real dream believe 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 invisible hollywood men If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to blind, imprison, and destroy. Ralph Ellison us free blind power
