Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
Ralph EllisonSome 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.
Ralph EllisonPower doesn't have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it.
Ralph EllisonSo 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 EllisonEclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.
Ralph EllisonBut 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