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
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.
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.
Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
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.
If you can show me how I can cling to that which is real to me, while teaching me a way into the larger society, then and only then will I drop my defenses and hostility, and I will sing your praises and help you to make the desert bear fruit.
The understanding of art depends finally upon one's willingness to extend one's humanity and one's knowledge of human life.
Hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
That which we remember is, more often than not, that which we would like to have been; or that which we hope to be. Thus our memory and our identity are ever at odds; our history ever a tale told by inattentive idealists.
Imitation is suicide, envy is ignorance.
Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.
Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself out of those values.
Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled 'file and forget.'
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.