The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.
Ralph EllisonPower, for the writer....lies in his ability to reveal if only a little bit more about the complexity of humanity.
Ralph EllisonThe act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
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 Ellison