It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself.
Ralph EllisonI'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.
Ralph EllisonIn those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
Ralph EllisonEverywhere I've turned somebody has wanted to sacrifice me for my own goodโonly /they/ were the ones who benefited. And now we start on the old sacrificial merry-go-round. At what point do we stop?
Ralph Ellison