In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
Ralph EllisonAll novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority. The universal in the novel-and isn't that what we're all clamoring for these days?-is reached only through the depiction of the specific man in a specific circumstance.
Ralph EllisonHaving tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge.
Ralph EllisonWithout the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled 'file and forget.'
Ralph EllisonThe blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstance whether created by others or by one's own human failings. They are the only consistent art in the United States which constantly remind us of our limitations while encouraging us to see how far we can actually go. When understood in their more profound implication, they are a corrective, an attempt to draw a line upon man's own limitless assertion.
Ralph Ellison